Good Samaritan Society - Larimore

In addition to being a quality nursing home overall, this nursing home really excelled in nursing, where it received an A. Nursing ratings are based largely on quality and quantity of nursing care. This particular nursing home provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This nursing home performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a facility has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can generally be prevented if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

This nursing home also was given an impressive short-term care score. In fact, we awarded it an above average score of B+ in this area. In calculating our short-term care scores, we scrutinize the nursing home's levels of highly skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists respiratory therapists and other highly trained professionals. This area is considered to be a reliable measure of the nursing home's rehabilitation services. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not every facility employs these skilled professionals. However, based on the information this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The last statistic we considered in this category is the percentage of patients who returned home from the facility. We found that 0 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home as opposed to remaining at the nursing home on a permanent basis.

Turning to another of this nursing home's strengths, it also received a very impressive inspection grade. In that category, we awarded this nursing home a grade of B+. Inspection grades are tied to datapoints found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places that receive favorable grades in this area typically have very few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these facilities should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. While this place had a few deficiencies on its government inspection report, none of them were severe based on CMS' deficiency scale. We should point out that deficiency-free inspection reports are rare in this industry.

The final category we analyzed is long-term care. We awarded this facility one of our better scores in that area, with a B. This facility turned out to be relatively strong in each category we looked at. Facilities that receive this kind of score in this category tend to provide consistent around the clock care to make sure patients are well cared for. After we finished assessing the volume of care provided by nurses, we turned to the nursing home's vaccination records. This facility vaccinated 97.14286 percent of its patients against pneumonia, which is an impressive figure. Pneumonia sadly can be a life or death illness for nursing home patients so we prefer when a facility does not leave its residents vulnerable. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.