Good Samaritan Society - Waukon

One of the many reasons this turned out to be a quality nursing home is that it received an A+ inspection grade. This is simply as good as it gets in this critical category. Inspection scores account for a host of factors included in a nursing home's inspection reports. One of the most important criteria we rely on is the quantity and severity of deficiencies. Nursing homes with better grades in this area tend to have few severe deficiencies. Although this nursing home had some deficiencies on its report, none of them were serious based on CMS' scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Among its many impressive grades, this facility received an excellent nursing grade. In fact, we gave it a grade of A in that category. Nursing grades are mostly associated with the facility's nurse staffing. This facility provided 3.2 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also looked at a few quality-based metrics in determining our nursing grades. This facility excelled in these areas, with excellent scores for minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. These areas are generally reliable indicators of the quality of nursing care a nursing home provides.

This facility received a strong long-term care grade as well. We gave it one of our better scores in that category with a score of B+. When facilities receive this type of score in long-term care it is usually a good sign for patient care and indicates that the nursing home is well-staffed with nurses and aids. On top of assessing the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we analyzed the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility administered the vaccine to 95.625 percent of its residents. Vaccines are critical to keeping patients healthy. Lastly, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had only 0.26 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

The final area we assessed was short-term care, in which this nursing home received a B-. While this proved to be its worst category rating, this is still not a poor grade. In forming our short-term care grades, we assess the facility's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, respiratory therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. Our goal is to create a barometer for comparing the rehabilitation services of different nursing homes. One reason for this facility's strong score in this category is that it provides more care with registered nurses to its residents than the average nursing home. The final metric we assessed in this area is the percentage of residents who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We discovered that just 41.1 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home, which is below average.