Good Samaritan Society - Villisca

We also wanted to point out that this nursing home has received near flawless health inspections in recent years. We gave them an A+ in this area. Our inspection scores weigh several factors included in a nursing home's inspection report. One key criteria we look at is the quantity and severity of deficiencies. Places with better scores in this category generally have few severe deficiencies. While this nursing home had some deficiencies on its report, none of them were severe based on CMS' deficiency scale. A few minor dings are not necessarily the end of the world.

An additional strong feature for this facility is that it was given a favorable short-term care score. In fact, this proved to be its second best category grade. In that area, we gave this nursing home a B+. Our short-term care ratings are believed to be most critical for residents needing a nursing home for rehabilitation. Rehabilitation generally requires higher levels of skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes not only nursing services, but also physical and occupational therapy, as well as other types of therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not every nursing home 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 item we assessed in this category is the number of residents that were able to return home from the facility. We found that 0 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home as opposed to remaining at the nursing home on a permanent basis.

This facility is also strong in the area of nursing, where it received a grade of B+. It outperformed most nursing homes in this category. When computing a facility's nursing rating, we weigh the number of hours nurses are caring for patients as well as the level of skill of the nurses. This nursing home provides 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 place performed very well when it comes to minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

Moving on to the next category, this nursing home received an acceptable long-term care score. Although this isn't as elite as some of its other scores, this is still not a terrible score. Our long-term care grade assesses a nursing home's personal care rather than the skilled therapy and medical services that are critical to a rehabilitation facility. Once we assessed the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we next considered the facility's vaccination record. This facility vaccinated 96.09375 percent of its patients for pneumonia, which is better than the majority of nursing homes. Finally, this nursing home was also able to limit hospitalizations. It had only 0.02 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.