Fil-Am owned nursing home gets highest US Medicare rating

STOCKTON, California — A Filipino-American owned and operated skilled nursing facility in the US bagged a major feat this year, gaining a five-star rating from the US Department of Health and Human Services and the US Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Good Samaritan Rehabilitation & Care Center’s overall 5-star rating was among the highest achieved by any skilled nursing facilities in the State of California and across the US. Very few nursing homes are given such high marks for various quality measures and quality indicators. Medicare’s Nursing Home Compare provides quality ratings for each of the nation’s 16,000 Medicare and Medicaid/MediCal-certified nursing homes. Each facility is rated from a low of one star to a high of five stars based on three critical areas: health inspection results, quality measures and staffing levels. Good Samaritan received five-star rating for health inspection results, quality measures, and staffing levels. According to Medicare, the Five-Star Quality Rating System was created to help consumers, their families, and caregivers compare nursing homes more easily and help identify areas about which they may want to ask questions. The grade given to the Fil-Am owned nursing facility was based on the rating system based on continued efforts as a result of the Omnibus Reconciliation Act of 1987 (OBRA ‘87), a nursing home reform law, and more recent quality improvement campaigns such as the Advancing Excellence in America’s Nursing Homes, a coalition of consumers, health care providers, and nursing home professionals. “Nursing homes vary in the quality of care and services they provide to their residents. Reviewing health inspection results, staffing data, and quality measure data are three important ways to measure nursing home quality. This information gives you a “snap shot" of the care individual nursing homes give," it added. Sedy Demesa, owner of Good Samaritan Rehabilitation & Care Center, said the facility’s administration takes Medicare’s five-star rating system seriously, adding that efforts are underway to maintain and further improve the quality of services and programs provided by the skilled nursing facility to its residents. Demesa also owns and operates Emmanuel College in the US Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, which is the first and only higher-learning institution in the American Pacific that has been offering an abridged 11-month vocational nursing program that is patterned after a proven curriculum in California. Emmanuel College-CNMI boasts of having a 100-percent passing rate for the National Council Licensure Examination (NCLEX), an examination for the licensing of nurses in the United States. - GMANews.TV