Good Samaritan Society - Lemars

On top of earning a great overall score, this facility excelled in nursing. In fact, we gave it an A for that area. There are a host of subcategories included in this area. Many of these criteria are tied to the quantity of nurse staffing. This facility provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality measures and this facility excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any place the nation in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can many times be prevented by offering better nursing care, such as having a policy of turning a resident even once per day.

Adding to this facility's impressive resume, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A for our inspections rating. Our inspection ratings are tied to datapoints found on the a nursing home's inspections. Nursing homes that score well in this category have very few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these nursing homes should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. This nursing home was assessed 4 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none of the deficiencies were considered to be severe. This means that the government inspectors didn't deem any of these deficiencies to cause an immediate threat to resident safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Building on its fine assessment, this nursing home also was given an excellent long-term care grade, with a score of A-. Nursing homes that receive this type of score in long-term care typically provide consistent around the clock care to ensure patients are kept in good health. In addition to looking at the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility gave the vaccine to 96.79144 percent of its residents, which is more than the majority of nursing homes. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

The last area we looked at is short-term care, in which this facility was given a B-. This actually ended up being this facility's weakest category. This is nevertheless not a major area of concern. In forming our short-term care grades, we quantify the nursing home's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, speech therapists, physical therapists and other types of skilled professionals. The goal is to formulate a measure for sizing up the rehabilitation services of various nursing homes. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not every nursing home employs these types of nurses. However, based on the information this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The final statistic we assessed in this category is the percentage of residents who ultimately were able to return home from the nursing home. We found that just 4 percent of this facility's residents returned home.