Advanced Health Care of Salem

Advanced Health Care of Salem is a very-small nursing home located in Salem, Utah. It looks like this nursing home is one of the highest-graded nursing homes we looked at. In fact, it was given our most impressive rating. We were so impressed with this nursing home that we rated it as one of the 10 best facilities in Utah. We also gave this nursing home strong grades in all four of the major categories. More information about these categories can be found below.

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. Our inspection ratings weigh several factors found on a facility's inspection reports. One of the most important criteria we weigh heavily is the quantity and severity of deficiencies. Places with better grades in this category generally have few of these severe deficiencies. This particular nursing home had just a single deficiency on its inspection report and it was not one deemed to pose a threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This nursing home received superb marks in the category of short-term care. For this reason, it received one of our most impressive grades in that category with a score of A+. In determining our short-term care grades, we scrutinize the nursing home's levels of highly skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists respiratory therapists and other highly trained professionals. This rating is often a solid measure of a nursing home's rehabilitation. This facility is the gold standard when it comes to skilled nursing staffing. It provided roughly 1.5 times as many registered nurse and physical therapist hours per patient than a typical nursing home. This is what we look for when grading a facility in this category. The last item we assessed in this category is the number of residents that ultimately returned home from the nursing home. We found that it fared as well as just about any facility in Utah in this area with 62.7 percent of its residents returning home. At most nursing homes, fewer than half of their short-stay residents are able to return home.

This facility also performed well in the category of long-term care, where we awarded it a score of A. Not many facilities performed better in this category. For prospective residents in need of a permanent residence as opposed to rehabilitation, long-term care is a very important category. In addition to looking at the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we analyzed the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. Unfortunately, we weren't able to find this facility's vaccination rates. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

In our final area, this nursing home also received a very strong nursing score, with an A. This topped off a rare straight A report card. The nursing score is based on many subcategories, however, the most important consideration is the quantity of nurse hours per patient per week. This place provides an incredible 5.6 hours of nursing care per resident each day. Very few nursing homes provide this quantity of nursing care to their patients. Out of this total, many of the hours were provided by registered nurses, which is one of the most highly trained levels of nurses. On top of providing high levels of care, this nursing home also excelled in the quality-based metrics we assessed. It performed as well as any nursing home in Utah in the area of avoiding major falls and pressure ulcers.