T J Samson Community Hospital

In addition to being a great nursing home overall, it also earned A+ inspections recently. Its inspections are nearly perfect. Our inspection scores weigh a host of factors included in a nursing home's inspection reports. One key criteria we look at is the quantity and severity of deficiencies. Nursing homes with better scores in this category usually have very few of these severe deficiencies. We weren't able to track down information about this nursing home's deficiencies. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

An additional reason we graded this nursing home so favorably is that it was awarded an A+ short-term care grade. This is just about as good as it gets in this category. Short-term care grades are commonly employed to assess a nursing home's performance with rehabilitation. In order to provide quality rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally must provide better levels of highly skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists and other types of therapists. Fortunately, it appear that this facility employs registered nurses. Not every facility employs these skilled professionals. However, according to the data this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The final metric we assessed in this area is the number of patients who ultimately were able to return home from the nursing home. We found that 6.5 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home as opposed to remaining at the facility on a permanent basis.

Turning the page to our third category, we awarded this facility a score of A for our long-term care rating. This is a very strong score. In a long-term care setting, the facility's primary goal is to keep patients healthy and safe. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate residents. On top of considering the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. Unfortunately, we weren't able to track down this place's vaccination data. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

In the final category we analyzed, this nursing home was given a very favorable grade of A- in our nursing category. With this score, the nursing home completed a straight A report card. We assessed the qualifications of nurses employed by the facility, in addition to the number of hours those nurses spent with residents, in determining our rating in this category. This nursing home averages 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This facility performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a place has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can generally be prevented if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.