Salem Crossing

Salem Crossing is an average-sized non-profit facility in Salem, Indiana. With an overall rating of B-, this is a solid nursing home. This place seems to have some things working in its favor. One of the best aspects of this nursing home's profile is its exemplary inspection score, which you can find in the next paragraph.

While this facility's overall grade was not bad, it really excelled in the category of inspections. In fact, we awarded it a grade of A for that category, which is one of our best scores. Our inspection ratings are based on datapoints found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes that excel in this area have few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these places should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. While this facility had some deficiencies on its government inspection report, none were major deficiencies based on CMS' deficiency scale. We should point out that deficiency-free inspection reports are rare in the industry.

Additionally, we also would like to point out that this facility received strong short-term care marks in this assessment. We gave them one of our more favorable grades in that category, with a B+. This proved to be the nursing home's second strongest score. Short-term care grades are based on a nursing home's quantity of highly-skilled nursing services. This includes a wide spectrum of services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and respiratory therapists, in addition to other forms of therapy. We were extremely impressed to find that this facility offers its residents substantially more physical therapist hours than most other nursing homes. The last statistic we looked at in this category is the percentage of patients who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We found that it fared as well as just about any nursing home in Indiana in this area with 56.8 percent of its residents returning home. At most facilities, fewer than half of their short-stay residents are able to return home.

This facility's next best category was its nursing grade, where it received a grade of C. The nursing grade consists of many subcategories, most of which are tied to levels of nurse staffing. Based on the CMS data, this nursing home offers 3.7 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, our nursing grades also factor in some quality-focused statistics. Specifically, we look at the percent of residents who sustained pressure ulcers and major falls. We look at these areas as reliable measures of the quality of nursing care, since better care tends to reduce these problems.

Switching gears to our fourth area, we gave this facility a D in the area of long-term care. This was the facility's weakest category score. Of course, this grade pulled down the nursing home's overall profile to some degree. For residents in need of a permanent place to live as opposed to rehabilitation, long-term care grades are an important measure. On top of looking at the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. Thankfully, this nursing home administered the vaccine to 99.6732 percent of its residents, which is an above average figure. To our surprise, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. With just 0.81 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, this facility had less hospitalizations than the average nursing home. Unfortunately, a few of its other scores in this category weren't as favorable as these.