Salem Care Center

To pair with its relatively modest overall grade, we awarded this facility an A- for our inspections rating. This grade is far more impressive than its overall grade. Perhaps the most important factor we look at in calculating our inspection grades is deficiencies. Deficiencies are found on a facility's recent inspection reports. Facilities with better scores in this area typically avoided the most severe deficiencies involving health risks or even death. This facility received 3 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none of the deficiencies were considered to be major deficiencies. This tells you that CMS didn't deem any of these deficiencies an imminent risk to patient safety or health. The fact that none of the deficiencies were severe leaves us less concerned with this inspection report.

This nursing home also excelled in the area of nursing, where it earned an B. Few facilities performed better in this category. Our nursing rating is largely based on the facility's level of nurse staffing. This nursing home averages 0 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality measures and this nursing home excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any place Missouri in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can typically be prevented by providing better nursing care, such as employing a system of turning a resident at least once a day.

This facility also received an impressive short-term care score. In fact, we gave them a B in this category, which is one of our more favorable scores. Our short-term care ratings are based on a facility's quantity of skilled skilled healthcare professionals. This means a vast scope of services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, in addition to other types of therapy. Unfortunately, we weren't able to track down information on registered nurse or physical therapy staffing for this nursing home. The final datapoint we looked at in this area is the percentage of residents that returned home from the facility. We found that 0 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home as opposed to remaining at the nursing home on a permanent basis.

The next category we looked at is long-term care. We gave it an F in this area, which is a bottom of the barrel grade. This is obviously a major disappointment. When nursing homes receive a score in this range in this category it typically means the nursing home did not perform well in our quality measures relating to patient care. On top of assessing the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. We discovered that this nursing home provided the vaccine to just 33.57143 percent of its residents, which is quite a bit lower than we expected. Surprisingly, this nursing home was actually able to limit hospitalizations. With just 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, this facility had fewer hospitalizations than the majority of nursing homes. This was its best score in this category.