Good Samaritan Society--White Acres

The main reason this facility received a decent overall score is its impeccable inspections in recent years. We gave them one of our higher scores in that category, with a grade of A-. This is a much better grade than the facility's overall score, which was decent but certainly not elite. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in computing our inspection ratings. One key factor is health deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of the deficiencies is usually more important than the quantity of deficiencies, as some of these are relatively minor. This place received 2 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none of the deficiencies were considered to be major deficiencies. This tells you that CMS didn't deem any of these deficiencies to cause an immediate threat to resident health or safety. The fact that none of the deficiencies were severe made us feel better about this inspection report.

This facility also excelled in the category of short-term care, with a very impressive grade of A- in this category. Our short-term care grade is commonly employed to score a facility's rehabilitation services. In order to offer high-end rehabilitation services, facilities generally must have better levels of highly skilled nursing services. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other highly skilled individuals. It doesn't appear that this nursing home submitted information on registered nurse or physical therapist staffing. Finally, we assessed the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 6.7 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.

This facilities third most favorable category was long-term care. We awarded it a grade of C in this area. This is basically a middle of the pack grade in this area. In our long-term care rating, we focus on the quantity of services offered by a facility, as well as a few quality statistics. On top of assessing the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we analyzed the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home gave the vaccine to 100 percent of its residents, which is higher than the majority of nursing homes. Lastly, this place was also able to limit hospitalizations. It had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

This nursing home's least impressive category was nursing, which is the last area we scored. For this category, we awarded this nursing home a grade of just D. Nursing scores are heavily correlated with levels of nurse staffing. With only 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day, this place's nurse staffing levels were quite a bit below average. In addition to receiving below average scores for nursing hours, this facility was a bit less impressive in some of the quality-based measures we looked at in calculating our nursing grades. We looked at the percent of residents sustaining pressure ulcers and found this facility was at approximately 1.5 times the national average in this statistic.