Autumn Care of Salisbury

This facility earned a solid overall grade as described above, but we really wanted to point out its nearly flawless inspection reports in recent years. We gave them an impressive grade of A in this category. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in computing our inspection grades. One of those factors is deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of these deficiencies is usually more meaningful than the quantity of deficiencies, as some are quite insignificant. Fortunately, although this facility had a few minor dings on its report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are labeled as categories G through L. This tells you that the government inspectors didn't consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. Keep in mind that deficiency-free inspection reports are rare in this industry.

In addition, we also wanted to note that this facility was awarded positive short-term care marks this year. We awarded them one of our more favorable grades in that area, with a B. This proved to be the facility's second strongest grade. Our short-term care grade is often used to judge a facility's rehabilitation services. To have good rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally must have higher levels of skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists and other licensed professionals. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not all nursing homes employs these types of nurses. However, based on the data they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Finally, we looked at the number of residents who who were able to eventually return home from this nursing home. We found that 5.5 percent of this facility's patients returned home.

Another one of this facility's more impressive category scores was in the category of long-term care. In that category, we gave this facility a grade of B. Facilities that do well in long-term care tend to be well-staffed and offer extensive hands on care to patients. After we finished assessing the quantity of nursing care, we then looked at the facility's vaccination record. This facility vaccinated 99.64789 percent of its residents for pneumonia, which is an impressive figure. Pneumonia is often a dangerous health condition for nursing home patients so we like it when a facility does not leave its residents vulnerable. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

The last area we rated is nursing, which proved to be this nursing home's worst area. We gave this facility a grade of D in this area. Of course, this grade pulled down the nursing home's overall grade to a certain degree. We analyzed the qualifications of nurses working for the facility, as well as the number of hours the nurses were with patients, in determining our grade in this area. This place averaged a meager 0.3 hours of nursing care per patient each day. This is not a very impressive figure. Finally, we also looked at some nursing quality-based metrics in calculating our nursing grades. This place performed well when it comes to minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers. We consider these data points to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.