Good Samaritan Society - Valley Vista

Good Samaritan Society - Valley Vista is a small non-profit facility in Wamego, Kansas. With an overall score of B+, this nursing home should work for most prospective residents. This nursing home truly has plenty of good features. The best part of this facility's strong profile was its inspection rating. Inspection grades are discussed in the next section

This facility received a strong overall score as described above, but we especially want to point out its nearly flawless inspections in recent years. We gave it an impressive grade of A in this category. Inspection ratings weigh several factors found on a nursing home's inspection reports. One of the most important criteria we look at is the quantity and severity of deficiencies. Facilities with better grades in this area tend to have very few severe deficiencies. This place was hit with 2 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none of the deficiencies were considered to be severe. This tells you that CMS didn't consider any of the deficiencies to be an imminent threat to resident safety or health. We should point out that deficiency-free inspections are uncommon in the industry.

This facility really excelled in the area of nursing, where it received a grade of A-. Few nursing homes performed better in this area. Nursing ratings are primarily tied to a nursing home's nurse staffing. This nursing home provides 3.2 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality measures 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 nursing home Kansas in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can typically be prevented by offering better nursing care, such as by employing a protocol of moving a resident more often.

Moving on our third category, this nursing home was awarded a dominant long-term care score. In that category, we gave this facility a A-. Nursing homes that receive this kind of score in long-term care tend to provide consistent around the clock care to ensure residents are kept in good health. On top of looking at the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility provided the vaccine to 95.53073 percent of its patients, which is very impressive. Pneumonia is often a life threatening illness for nursing home residents so we like it when a facility does not take any chances. The last datapoint we assessed was its hospitalization rate. Here we found that this nursing home had 2.59 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days.

The last area we scored is short-term care, which ended up being a weak link for this nursing home. We awarded this nursing home a grade of D in our short-term care category, leaving this as the nursing home's weakest grade. We'd still suggest that you consider all of a facility's category grades. In computing our short-term care grades, we assess a nursing home's levels of skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists speech therapists and other types of therapists. This category is often a useful assessment of the nursing home's rehabilitation services. Unfortunately, we found that this nursing home provided fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than most other facilities. Finally, we assessed the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. This definitely was not a strength for this nursing home. We found that just 31.5 percent of this facility's patients returned home. At most nursing homes, about half of their patients are able to return home so this is well below average.