Good Samaritan Society Tyndall

To pair with its strong overall grade, we awarded this facility an A+ for inspections. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in calculating our inspection scores. One of those factors is health deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of deficiencies is arguably more important than the quantity of deficiencies, as some are relatively insignificant. Unfortunately, we weren't able to find deficiency data for this facility. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Among its many high-end grades, this nursing home was awarded a top-shelf long-term care grade. In fact, it received a grade of A in that area. Facilities that do well in long-term care typically are well-staffed and provide extensive hands on care to residents. After looking at the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we then analyzed the facility's vaccination statistics. This facility vaccinated 100 percent of its residents for pneumonia. Vaccines are critical to keeping patients out of the hospital. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents 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. Our nursing grade focuses on the facility's level of nurse staffing. We look at both the levels of licensure of the nurses and the number of hours spent with residents. This particular nursing home provided 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality-based metrics and this facility excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any place South Dakota 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 moving a patient at least once a day.

In our final area, this facility also was awarded a very strong short-term care score, with a grade of B+. This wrapped up a very favorable profile. In computing our short-term care scores, we analyze the nursing home's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, speech therapists, physical therapists and other types of skilled professionals. Our goal is to formulate a scale for sizing up the rehabilitation services of various facilities. 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, according to the information they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Lastly, we assessed the number of residents that who were able to eventually return home from this facility. We found that 0 percent of this facility's residents returned home.