Good Samaritan Society - Waukon

Located in Waukon, Iowa, Good Samaritan Society - Waukon is one of just two available facilities in this area. Featuring an overall score of A-, this is clearly a very strong facility. We were so impressed with this facility that we ranked it in the top 25 percent of all facilities nationally. As you can find below, this nursing home also performed just fine in our category grades. It's hard to poke holes in this nursing home's profile.

One of the reasons this place turned out to be a quality nursing home is that it earned an A+ in our inspections category. This is simply as good as it gets in this category. Our inspection grades are tied to several datapoints found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Facilities that receive favorable grades in this category have few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these places generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. This facility was assessed 4 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none of the deficiencies were considered to be severe deficiencies. This means that the government inspectors did not consider any of these deficiencies to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

On the list of its many high-end grades, this facility was given first-rate long-term care score. In fact, it received a score of A- in that area. When facilities receive this type of grade in this category it is usually a good sign for resident care and indicates that the place is well-staffed with nurses aids. One of the criteria we considered after nursing hours is vaccines. This facility administered the pneumonia vaccine to 100 percent of its residents. This is a reliable method to minimize unnecessary deaths and hospitalizations for the senior population. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. It had only 0.74 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

Adding to its profile, this facility also earned a grade of B+ for its nursing rating. This is a well above average score in this category. The nursing score weighs a handful of datapoints, many of which are associated with levels of nurse staffing. This particular nursing home provided 3.6 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed certain nursing quality measures in computing our nursing grades. These include minimizing residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We view these areas as reliable measures of the quality of nursing care provided, since better care tends to reduce these problems.

The fourth area we analyzed is short-term care, where this nursing home received a grade of B+. This rounded out an elite profile. Not many facilities received a B+ or higher in every single category. Short-term care ratings are based in part on the facility's quantity of skilled highly skilled professionals. This means a broad range of services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and occupational therapists, not to mention other variations of therapy. One of this nursing home's strength is that it offers more hours of care from registered nurses to its residents. Lastly, we looked at the percentage of residents that returned home from this facility. We found that 44.2 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home.