Good Samaritan Society- Socorro

This nursing home's overall grade was propped up by the fact that it has earned favorable inspections in recent years. We gave them a strong score in that category, with a B. This is a much better grade than the facility's overall grade. Inspection scores are based on several items located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Facilities that excel in this area typically have very few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these facilities generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. Fortunately, although this place had a few minor dings on its inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you that the inspectors didn't consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. A few minor deficiencies shouldn't stop you from considering a nursing home.

Another one of this nursing home's more impressive category grades came in the category of short-term care. In that area, we gave this facility a B. Our short-term care grade is commonly used to gauge a facility's rehabilitation services. To offer high-end rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally must have better levels of highly skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other highly skilled individuals. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not every nursing home employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, based on the information they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The last statistic we looked at in this category is the number of residents who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. We discovered that 0 percent of this nursing home's residents were able to return home.

This nursing home's next best category was nursing. We awarded it a grade of B- in this category. This is basically a middle of the road grade in this category. Our nursing score assesses quite a few subcategories, but the paramount consideration is the quantity of nurse hours per patient per week. This place provided just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident daily. This is a relatively low total compared with most facilities. Despite having low quantities of nursing care, this nursing home actually excelled in some of the quality-based metrics we assessed. In fact, it performed well in terms of minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care. In many cases, the quality of nursing care is just as important as the quantity of hours of care provided.

The final area we looked at is long-term care. This nursing home received a C in this category. Long-term care grades assess a facility's personal care instead of the highly skilled nursing and healthcare services that are critical to a rehabilitation facility. In addition to looking at the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home vaccinated 94.5946 percent of its residents. 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 a remarkably low number.