Good Samaritan Society - Wamego

In addition to receiving a great overall grade, this nursing home also received top notch government inspections in recent years. We awarded them one of our best scores in that area, with an A-. Our inspection ratings account for several factors included in a facility's inspection report. One of the most important criteria we weigh heavily is the number and severity of deficiencies. Nursing homes with better scores in this area tend to have very few severe deficiencies. Fortunately, although this facility had a few minor dings on its inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones labeled as categories G through L. This tells you the government inspectors did not deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. The fact that the deficiencies were relatively minor made us feel better about this inspection report.

One of the other reasons we graded this nursing home so well is that it was given a dominant short-term care score. In fact, short-term care ended up being its second most impressive category score. In that area, we gave this nursing home a grade of A-. Our short-term care grade is generally employed to grade a nursing home's performance with rehabilitation. In order to offer quality rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally must offer higher levels of skilled nursing. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other types of therapists. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not all nursing homes employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, based on the data this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The final metric we considered in this category is the percentage of residents who were able to leave the nursing home and return home. We found that 0 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.

This facility received a very good nursing grade this year as well. It received one of our better scores in that category with a grade of B+. Our nursing score assesses the facility's nurse staffing levels. We factor in both the levels of licensure of those nurses and the quantity of hours spent with patients. This nursing home averages 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also looked at some nursing quality measures in determining our nursing grades. This nursing home performed very well in the area of minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

The next area we graded was long-term care, which ended up being this facility's worst category. We awarded this facility a D in that area. Of course, this grade pulled down the nursing home's overall profile to some degree. For long-term care residents, the facility's primary objective is to maintain patients' quality of life and keep them safe. On top of considering the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. Fortunately, this facility provided the vaccine to 99.35898 percent of its residents, which is a very solid total. To our surprise, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. With only 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, this facility has less hospitalizations than the majority of nursing homes. Sadly, a few of its other scores in this category were not as favorable as these.