Good Samaritan Society - Syracuse

On top of performing well in its overall grade, this nursing home earned a nearly flawless inspection report. As a result, it received one of our highest scores in this area with an A. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in determining our inspection grades. One of those factors is health deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of deficiencies is usually more meaningful than the quantity of deficiencies, as some of these end up being quite insignificant. While this facility had some deficiencies on its inspection report, none of them were major deficiencies based on CMS' scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

We also wanted to emphasize the fact that this facility was awarded a strong grade of A in our long-term care category. In a long-term care setting, the nursing home's primary goal is to maintain patients' quality of life and keep them safe. In addition to assessing the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home provided the vaccine to 90.74074 percent of its residents. This is somewhat below what we were hoping for but still a reasonably acceptable percentage. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

This facility also excelled in the area of nursing, where it received a grade of A-. Few nursing homes performed better in this area. The nursing rating features several factors. The most important variable is the quantity of hours nurses spend with patients. This nursing home provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality measures 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 nation in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can typically be prevented by providing better nursing care, such as employing a policy of moving a resident even once per day.

In our last category, we gave this nursing home an A for its short-term care score. This completed a very impressive profile. Our short-term care grade is generally employed to measure a nursing home's rehabilitation services. To provide high-end rehabilitation services, facilities generally must provide higher levels of highly skilled nursing services. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists and other licensed professionals. Fortunately, it looks like this facility employs registered nurses. Not every facility employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, according to the information this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The final datapoint we looked at in this category is the number of patients that were able to return home from the facility. We found that 0 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home as opposed to remaining at the facility on a permanent basis.