Good Samaritan Society - Mountain Lake

To go along with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A for our nursing rating. Our nursing rating is based on the nursing home's level of nurse staffing. We factor in both the levels of training of those nurses as well as the amount of time spent with residents. This particular nursing home provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at some nursing quality measures in determining our nursing grades. This facility performed very well in terms of minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

This facility has received near flawless health inspections in recent years. We awarded them an impressive grade of A- in this category. Perhaps the most important factor we consider in determining our inspection grades is deficiencies. Deficiencies are found on a facility's inspection reports. Nursing homes with better grades in this area most likely avoided the most severe deficiencies involving health risks or even death. 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. A deficiency-free inspection report is what we look for.

This nursing home also was given a very strong short-term care score. Indeed, this is this nursing home's third strongest category score. In that category, this facility received a score of A-. In calculating our short-term care ratings, we look at the nursing home's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses, speech therapists, physical therapists and other types of skilled professionals. Our goal is to devise a tool for sizing up the rehabilitation services of various facilities. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not every facility employs these skilled professionals. However, based on the information they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Lastly, we considered the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 0 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.

Turning to the final area, this facility was awarded an extremely favorable long-term care rating. While this is not as impressive as many of its other grades, this is still one of our more impressive scores a facility can receive. For long-term care residents, the nursing home's primary goal is to keep patients as healthy and safe as possible. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate residents. In addition to considering the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we analyzed the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home administered the vaccine to 91.52542 percent of its patients. This is slightly lower than we anticipated but still a reasonably acceptable figure. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.