Life Care Center of Salt Lake City

In addition to performing well overall, this nursing home earned nearly flawless government inspections. As a result, it received one of our highest scores in that category with an A+. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in calculating our inspection grades. One critical factor is health deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of deficiencies is arguably more meaningful than the number of deficiencies, as some of these can be quite insignificant. While this nursing home had a few minor dings on its inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are found in categories G through L. This tells you the government inspectors didn't deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This facility also received a strong short-term care grade. Indeed, this ended up being this nursing home's second most impressive category grade. In that area, we gave this facility a grade of A. In the area of short-term care, we attempt to assess indicators of a nursing home's rehabilitation services. We analyze the nursing home's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses and physical therapists. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not every nursing home employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, according to the information this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The last metric we assessed in this area is the percentage of patients that ultimately returned home from the facility. We found that 6.2 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home as opposed to remaining at the nursing home on a permanent basis.

We also want to emphasize the fact that this nursing home was given a high-end score of A- in our long-term care area. Nursing homes that excel in this category typically are well-staffed and offer extensive hands on care to residents. One of the factors we considered after nursing hours is vaccines. This nursing home provided the pneumonia vaccine to 100 percent of its residents. This is a great way to avoid unnecessary deaths and hospitalizations for the nursing home population. Finally, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. It had only 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

The final area we graded was nursing, in which this facility was given a grade of B. Believe it or not, this turned out to be this facility's worst category. A facility could be doing a lot worse when it's lowest score still is better than most facilities. When calculating a facility's nursing score, we weigh the amount of time nurses are seeing patients as well as the level of licensure of those nurses. This nursing home averages 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also looked at some nursing quality-based metrics in determining our nursing grades. This place performed very well in terms of minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.