Good Samaritan Society - Saint Ansgar

One of the many reasons this turned out to be a quality nursing home is that it received an A+ inspection grade. This is simply as good as it gets in this critical category. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in calculating our inspection ratings. One key factor is deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of deficiencies is usually more meaningful than the number of deficiencies, as some of these can be quite insignificant. While this facility had a few minor dings on its report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those labeled as categories G through L. This means CMS didn't deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. A couple relatively minor dings aren't necessarily something to panic about.

One of the other reasons we graded this facility so highly is that it earned a very impressive nursing grade. In fact, nursing turned out to be its second best category grade. In that area, we gave this facility an A. There are several factors within this area. Many of these datapoints relate to nurse staffing. This nursing home averages 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed 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 facility Iowa in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can generally be prevented by providing better nursing care, such as employing a system of turning a resident more frequently.

We also awarded this nursing home a decent grade in the area of long-term care, where it received a C. Long-term care ratings are based on the facility's amount of nursing services. This means a vast spectrum of personal care services, ranging from assistance with activities of daily living to routine healthcare services. Once we assessed the volume of care provided by nurses and other staff, we turned to the facility's vaccination statistics. We were optimistic to find that this nursing home vaccinated 98.4127 percent of its patients for pneumonia. This nursing home also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

The next area we rated proved to be this nursing home's poorest category. However, even in its weakest link we still gave it a decent grade of C for our short-term care category. Short-term care ratings are based on a facility's quantity of highly-skilled highly skilled professionals. This means a vast spectrum of services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and respiratory therapists, not to mention other variations of therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not every nursing home employs these types of nurses. However, according to the data this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The final metric we looked at in this category is the percentage of residents that eventually returned home from the facility. We found that just 4 percent of this facility's patients returned home. This figure was below the national average.