Good Samaritan Society - Oakes

In addition to 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. Inspection ratings are tied to several items found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes that excel in this category typically have few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these nursing homes generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. While this nursing home had a few deficiencies on its report, none of them were severe based on CMS' scale. We should point out that deficiency-free inspections are rare in the industry.

This nursing home performed well in our nursing category. In fact, we awarded it a grade of A- for that category, which is one of our highest scores. Our nursing grade is mostly tied to a nursing home's nurse staffing. This nursing home provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also looked at some nursing quality-based metrics in determining our nursing grades. This facility performed very well when it comes to minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

We also gave this facility a grade of A- for our short-term care score. Our short-term care grade is typically employed to assess a facility's rehabilitation services In order to offer good rehabilitation services, facilities generally need to offer higher levels of skilled nursing. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other types of therapists. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not all nursing homes employs these types of nurses. However, based on the information they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The final measure we looked at in this area is the percentage of residents that ultimately returned home from the nursing home. We found that 0 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home as opposed to remaining at the facility on a permanent basis.

The next area we graded is long-term care. We gave this nursing home a solid score in this category, with a grade of C. Although this is not on par with many of this nursing home's other grades, it is nevertheless not a terrible score. In computing our long-term care scores, we size up the personal care received by a facility's residents. In addition to looking at the quantity 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 99.46524 percent of its residents, which is more than the majority of nursing homes. Finally, this nursing home was also able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.