Good Samaritan Society - Pipestone

In addition to receiving a great overall score, this facility also received an excellent long-term care score, with an A. Long-term care scores in this range generally require both 24/7 care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine healthcare services. Once we finished looking at the quantity of care provided by nurses, we turned to the nursing home's vaccination statistics. This facility vaccinated 99.02913 percent of its residents for pneumonia, which is what we like to see. Pneumonia sadly can be a dangerous ailment for nursing home patients so we strongly prefer when a facility doesn't leave this to chance. 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 0.02 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

Adding to this facility's impressive resume, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A for our inspections rating. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in computing our inspection grades. One critical factor is deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of the deficiencies is arguably more meaningful than the number of deficiencies, as some deficiencies are quite minor. Fortunately, although this facility had a few minor dings on its inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those found in categories G through L. This means the inspectors did not consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Additionally, this facility also was given favorable short-term care scores this year. In fact, we awarded it one of our higher grades in that area, with a score of B. Short-term care grades are critical for individuals needing rehabilitation. Rehabilitation typically requires additional highly-skilled nursing. Skilled nursing means a broad spectrum of nursing services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, as well as other variations of therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not all nursing homes employs these types of nurses. However, according to the data this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The last metric we considered in this category is the number of residents who were able to leave the nursing home and return home. We found that 0 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home.

The final category we graded is nursing. This nursing home was given a favorable nursing score in our assessment, with a B. While this isn't as good as several of its other scores, this is nevertheless one of our stronger scores in this category. In calculating our nursing grades, we look at both the number of hours nurses spend with residents and the training levels of the nurses. This facility provided 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality measures and this place 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 country 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 employing a protocol of moving residents even once per day.