Good Samaritan Society - Villisca

In addition to being a first rate nursing home overall, this facility also excelled in the area of inspections, where it received a grade of A+. Very few places performed this well in this area. Our inspection ratings weigh several factors included in a nursing home's inspection report. One key criteria we weigh heavily is the number and severity of deficiencies. Nursing homes with higher scores in this category tend to have very few of these severe deficiencies. Although this nursing home had a few deficiencies on its government inspection report, none of them were serious based on CMS' deficiency scale. Remember that deficiency-free inspection reports are uncommon in this industry.

This nursing home also received a very impressive nursing grade. In fact, this turned out to be its second best category grade. In that area, we awarded this facility a grade of A. The nursing score considers a variety of subcategories. The most heavily weighted factor is the number of hours nurses spent with patients. This nursing home averages 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This nursing home performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a facility has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can generally be avoided if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

This nursing home received a strong short-term care grade as well. We awarded it one of our better grades in that area with a grade of B+. In our short-term care assessment, we attempt to craft a fair barometer for rehabilitation. In doing so, we look at a nursing home's offerings of highly-skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as respiratory therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not all facilities employs these types of nurses. However, according to the information this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The final datapoint we looked at in this area is the percentage of residents that returned 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.

The next category we looked at is long-term care, where this nursing home was awarded a grade of B-. Even though this wound up being its least impressive category grade, this is still not a bad grade. Our long-term care grade is generally used to assess a nursing home's performance as a traditional nursing home, as opposed to focusing more on the skilled nursing services provided by a skilled nursing facility. Once we looked at the volume of care provided by nurses and other staff, we then looked at the nursing home's vaccination statistics. This nursing home vaccinated 92.660545 percent of its patients for pneumonia, which happens to be a few points less than we expected but still a reasonably acceptable percentage. Nevertheless, this nursing home keeps its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0.03 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.