Good Samaritan Society - Postville

To go along with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A+ for our inspections rating. Arguably the most important factor we look at in computing our inspection grades is deficiencies. Deficiencies can be found on a facility's inspection reports. Places with higher grades in this area most likely avoided the more severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. While this nursing home had a few deficiencies on its government inspection report, none were severe based on CMS' scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Contributing to its profile, this nursing home also earned a score of B+ for its long-term care rating. This is a well above average grade in this category. When facilities receive this kind of score in long-term care it is typically a good sign for patient care and suggests that the nursing home is well-staffed with nurses and aids. Once we assessed the volume of nursing care, we then analyzed the facility's vaccination statistics. This facility vaccinated 94.80519 percent of its patients against pneumonia, which is very impressive. Pneumonia sadly is often a deadly health condition for nursing home residents so we like it when a facility doesn't leave its residents vulnerable. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

Turning to an additional strength for this nursing home, we awarded them one of our more positive scores in our short-term care category as well, with a grade of B. In calculating these short-term care scores, we quantify the facility's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses, occupational therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. Our purpose is to create a tool for comparing the rehabilitation services of nursing homes. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not every nursing home employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, according to the information they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Finally, we considered the percentage of residents 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.

Switching gears to our fourth category, this nursing home was awarded a decent nursing score. While this was not quite as impressive as several of its other scores, this is really not a bad grade. Our nursing grade is largely based on the facility's level of nurse staffing. This nursing home averages just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a very low figure. Finally, we like to look at quality-based metrics, such as the percentage of patients who experienced pressure ulcers and major falls. Sometimes these metrics are indicators of the quality of nursing care.