Good Samaritan Society - Waconia and Westview Acre

Good Samaritan Society - Waconia and Westview Acre is one of just a few available facilities in Waconia, Minnesota. We awarded this nursing home an A- overall grade, ranking it in the top third of all facilities in the United States. You flat out can not do any better than this place. This facility's strong profile was highlighted by its inspection rating, which is addressed in the next paragraph.

In addition to faring well overall, this facility also earned a nearly flawless inspection report. As a result, it received one of our best scores in that area with an A+. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in computing our inspection grades. One critical factor is health deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of these deficiencies is arguably more important than the number of deficiencies, as some of these can be relatively insignificant. This nursing home was assessed 2 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none were considered to be severe. This tells you that the government inspectors did not consider any of the deficiencies to create an imminent threat to resident health or safety. We should point out that deficiency-free inspections are rare in the industry.

We also would like to note the fact that this nursing home received a high-end score of A in our short-term care area. In determining our short-term care grades, we look at a nursing home's levels of highly skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists occupational therapists and other licensed professionals. This score is generally a reliable assessment of the facility's rehabilitation services. This nursing home elevated its grade in this category by offering more care from registered nurses to its residents than the average facility. Lastly, we looked at the percentage of residents who returned to the community from this nursing home. This place outperformed most facilities in this area with 50.8 percent of its patients returning home.

Adding to its strong resume, this facility also received an excellent nursing score, with a grade of A-. When determining our nursing grades, we assess both the number of hours nurses spend with residents and the training levels of the nurses. This nursing home provided 4.7 hours of nursing care per patient each day, which is among the more impressive totals in the country. A significant percentage of those hours were provided by registered nurses, which are one of the most skilled levels of nurses. We were very impressed by both of these statistics. On top of offering high levels of nursing care, this nursing home also performed well in many of the quality measures we looked at. In terms of the number of its patients sustaining falls leading to major injury, this nursing home performed better than the national average.

Switching gears to the fourth category, this facility received an acceptable long-term care rating. While this was not quite as dominant as many of its other scores, this is truly not the end of the world. Our long-term care grade assesses a facility's assistance with daily living rather than the highly skilled nursing or medical services that are critical to a skilled nursing facility. After looking at the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we turned to the facility's vaccination statistics. This facility vaccinated 93.07692 percent of its patients against pneumonia, which happens to be a few points lower than we anticipated but still a respectable percentage. Lastly, we looked at its number of hospitalizations. With 1.88 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, this facility was also slightly below the national average.