Good Samaritan Society Las Cruces Village

Good Samaritan Society Las Cruces Village is one of six facilities located in Las Cruces, New Mexico. This nursing home is a well below average nursing home. A grade of this caliber indicates we found some red flags. Based on our assessment, this place may not be the best fit for most prospective residents. More information on this facility's category grades is available below. Its best category was short-term care, which is discussed in the next section.

This facility received a very good grade in the category of short-term care. In fact, we awarded it a B for that category, which is one of our better scores. Short-term care grades are often employed to score a nursing home's rehabilitation services. To offer highly graded rehabilitation services, facilities generally must offer better levels of highly skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other highly skilled individuals. Fortunately, this nursing home offers both physical therapists and registered nurses. Not all facilities offer both. The final statistic we looked at in this area is the percentage of residents who were able to leave the facility and return home. It performed as well as just about any nursing home in New Mexico with 57.6 percent of its patients returning home. With most nursing homes, less than half of their short-term patients are able to return home.

This facility's second best area came in the area of long-term care. In that area, we gave this facility a C. In a long-term care setting, the primary goal is to maintain patients' quality of life and keep them safe. On top of looking at the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. As it turns out, this nursing home vaccinated just 58.050846 percent of its residents, which is several points lower than we expected. Fortunately, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. With only 1.52 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, this facility had fewer hospitalizations than the average nursing home.

Unfortunately, this facility only received a grade of D for its nursing grade, which was actually one of its better category grades. Nursing grades are based largely on nurse staffing levels. This particular nursing home provided 3.8 hours of nursing care per resident per day, which is below average. In addition to ranking below average in nursing hours per resident, this place also had poor scores in the quality-based measures we looked at in calculating our nursing grades. We looked at the percentage of patients sustaining pressure ulcers and major falls. This nursing home was at about 150 percent of the national average in both of these datapoints. This is a bad sign when you consider that many bed sores and falls are believed to be preventable with better nursing care. These scores pulled down this facility's nursing grade significantly.

Looking to our last category of inspections, we gave this facility a grade of just just D, which is a relatively poor grade. Our inspection grade is based on the facility's government inspection reports. Since this information is collected by independent government inspectors, we place significant weight on it in our overall grades. Our inspection grades weigh several factors found on a nursing home's inspection report. One key criteria we look at is the number and severity of deficiencies. This particular facility was assessed 3 deficiencies by CMS. The only positive thing we can say is that none of these deficiencies were in the categories that indicate they caused a threat to patient safety or health. Finally, this facility also received 3 substantiated complaints in recent years. This is yet another bad sign.