Salem East Healthcare Center

The main reason this turned out to be a decent nursing home is that it earned an elite inspection grade. Its inspection score was far superior to its overall grade. In the inspections category, we gave it an A. Perhaps the most critical factor we consider in determining our inspection grades is deficiencies. Deficiencies can be found on a facility's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes with higher grades in this area most likely dodged the most severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. Although this nursing home had a few deficiencies on its government inspection report, none were severe based on CMS' scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This facility also was given a favorable long-term care score. As a matter of fact, we gave them a grade of B+ in this category, which is one of our more favorable scores. Nursing homes that do well in long-term care tend to be well-staffed and provide extensive hands on care to patients. After assessing the volume of care provided by nurses and other staff, we then analyzed the facility's vaccination records. This nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its residents against pneumonia, which is significantly higher than the average nursing home. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. It had only 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

The next category we assessed is short-term care, where this facility was given a C in this category. Short-term care grades are commonly employed to gauge a facility's rehabilitation services In order to offer highly scored rehabilitation services, facilities generally must feature higher levels of skilled nursing. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other highly trained professionals. It does not look like this nursing home provided registered nurse or physical therapist staffing data. The final item we assessed in this area is the number of patients who eventually returned home from the facility. We found that just 5.3 percent of this facility's patients returned home.

The final category we assessed was nursing, which was this nursing home's weakest category. We awarded this nursing home a D in this area. Sadly, this category hurt the nursing home's overall grade a bit. Our nursing rating is primarily tied to a nursing home's nurse staffing. This nursing home provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a much lower figure than we are used to seeing. Finally, we also assessed some nursing quality measures in determining our nursing scores. This nursing home performed well in the area of avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls. Many consider these statistics to be indicators of the quality of nursing care.