Good Samaritan Society - Idaho Falls Village

In addition to faring well overall, this nursing home received high marks in our short-term care category as well. As a result, it received our highest grade in that category with an A+. Our short-term care grade is generally employed to judge a facility's performance with rehabilitation. In order to provide high-end rehabilitation services, facilities generally need to have better levels of skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other types of therapists. Fortunately, it appear that this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not every nursing home employs these skilled professionals. However, according to the information this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The final statistic we looked at in this category is the percentage of patients who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. We found that 7.1 percent of this nursing home's patients were able to return home.

An additional reason we graded this nursing home so favorably is that it was awarded an A+ long-term care grade. This is flat out as good as it gets in this area. When nursing homes receive this type of grade in this category it is a good sign for patient care and indicates that the nursing home is well-staffed with nurses and aids. One of the factors we considered in addition to nursing hours is vaccines. This nursing home provided the pneumonia vaccine to 98.24561 percent of its residents. Vaccination is a great way to minimize unnecessary deaths for the senior population. Lastly, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had only 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

Another impressive feature of this facility is its inspection grade. In that area, we awarded this facility a grade of A. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in determining our inspection ratings. One critical factor is deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of deficiencies is usually more important than the number of deficiencies, as some end up being quite minor. Although this nursing home had some deficiencies on its inspection report, none of them were serious based on CMS' scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

In the last category we analyzed, this facility was given an impressive grade grade of A in our nursing category. With this score, the facility finished off a straight A report card. When calculating a facility's nursing score, we look at the number of hours nurses spend with patients and the skill levels of those nurses. This nursing home averages 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also looked at certain nursing quality measures in computing our nursing grades. These include minimizing residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We look at these areas as reliable measures of the caliber of nursing care offered, since better care tends to reduce these problems.