Good Samaritan Society - St Johns

To go along with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A- for our nursing grade. In computing a nursing home's nursing rating, we weigh the number of hours nurses are seeing residents and the skill levels of the nurses. This facility provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality-based metrics and this nursing home 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 frequently be avoided by providing better nursing care, such as by employing a protocol of moving a patient more often.

In addition, this facility also excelled in inspections, where it received an B+. Few nursing homes performed better in this category. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in computing these inspection scores. One critical factor is health deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of the deficiencies is usually more meaningful than the quantity of deficiencies, as some of these are quite minor. This facility received 5 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none were considered to be major deficiencies. This tells you that the government inspectors did not deem any of the deficiencies an imminent risk to patient safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This facility was given a favorable long-term care grade as well. We awarded it one of our better grades in that category with a score of B+. For prospective residents looking for a permanent residence rather than skilled nursing, long-term care grades are an important measure. In addition to looking at the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home vaccinated 91.51515 percent of its patients. This is a few points below what we anticipated but still a respectable figure. Finally, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

The last area we looked at was short-term care, in which this facility was given a B-. This ended up being this nursing home's worst category. This is still not a terrible score. With our short-term care assessment, we seek to craft a valuable gauge for rehabilitation services. In doing so, we analyze a nursing home's offerings of highly-skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as respiratory therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not every facility employs these types of nurses. However, based on the information this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Finally, we looked at the number of residents who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 4.5 percent of this facility's residents returned home. At most nursing homes, closer to half of their residents are able to return home so this figure is below average.