Good Samaritan Society - Mountain Lake

On top of performing well in its overall grade, this facility performed at an even higher level in the area of inspections. In fact, it received a nearly flawless inspection report this year. As a result, it received one of our highest grades in that category with a score of A. Our inspection grades weigh a host of factors found on a facility's inspection report. One of the most important criteria we look at is the quantity and severity of deficiencies. Nursing homes with better grades in this category usually have few severe deficiencies. Amazingly, this was one of the few nursing homes in the country that had no deficiencies whatsoever on its inspection report. This is very impressive. This is what you like to see on an inspection report.

One of the other reasons we rated this nursing home so highly is that it earned a very impressive nursing score. In fact, nursing proved to be its second best category grade. In that area, we gave this facility a grade of B+. We looked at the licensure of nurses at the facility, as well as the quantity of hours those nurses worked with patients, in computing our score in this category. This particular nursing home provided 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed some nursing quality-based metrics in determining our nursing grades. This place performed very well in the area of minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

This nursing home is also strong in the area of short-term care, where it was given a grade of B. It performed better than most facilities in this category. Short-term care grades are often employed to gauge a facility's rehabilitation services In order to offer high-end rehabilitation services, facilities generally need to feature better levels of highly skilled nursing services. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other licensed professionals. Fortunately, it appear that this facility employs registered nurses. Not all facilities employs these skilled professionals. However, according to the data they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Lastly, we assessed the number of patients that returned home from this facility. We found that 4.6 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.

The final category we assessed was long-term care. We gave this nursing home an acceptable grade in that area, with a B-. While this wasn't as high as some of this facility's other grades, it is still a middle of the pack score. Our long-term care scores are based on the nursing home's quantity of nursing services. This includes a vast range of personal care services, ranging from help with activities of daily living to routine healthcare services. On top of considering the volume of care provided by nurses and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home provided the vaccine to 92.805756 percent of its patients, which is a bit less than we anticipated. Fortunately, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.