Good Samaritan Society-Scandia Village

In addition to being an elite facility overall, this nursing home excelled in the area of inspections, where it earned an A+. Few places performed this well in this category. Our inspection scores account for a host of factors included in a nursing home's inspection reports. One of the most important criteria we look at is the number and severity of deficiencies. Facilities with better grades in this area generally have few of these severe deficiencies. Although this nursing home had a few deficiencies on its inspection report, none were serious based on CMS' deficiency scale. The fact that none of the deficiencies were severe made us feel better about this inspection report.

Adding to its strong resume, this facility also received an excellent nursing score, with a grade of A. Nursing grades are largely based on a nursing home's nurse staffing. This nursing home averages 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also looked at some nursing quality measures in determining our nursing grades. This nursing home performed very well in terms of avoiding major falls and pressure ulcers. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

The next category we looked at is short-term care. Contributing to its top-shelf resume, this facility also performed well in this category. In fact, it received a grade of of A- for that category. In crafting these short-term care scores, we assess the facility's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, occupational therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. The purpose is to formulate a measure for comparing the rehabilitation services of different nursing homes. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not all nursing homes employs these types of nurses. However, according to the data they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The last metric we assessed in this category is the number of residents that ultimately were able to return home from the facility. We found that 5.3 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home as opposed to remaining at the nursing home on a permanent basis.

The last area we looked at is long-term care. This nursing home was awarded a strong long-term care grade in our assessment, with a C. While this was not quite as strong as a few of its other scores, this is still a respectable grade for that category. Our long-term care grade is generally used to gauge a nursing home's performance as a traditional nursing home, as opposed to focusing more on the skilled nursing services provided by a skilled nursing facility. After considering the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we next considered the nursing home's vaccination records. This facility vaccinated 100 percent of its patients against pneumonia, which is more than the vast majority of nursing homes. Finally, this nursing home was also able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.