Salem Health & Rehabilitation

While this nursing home'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. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in computing these inspection ratings. One of those factors is deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of the deficiencies is usually more meaningful than the number of deficiencies, as some can be relatively insignificant. This facility was assessed 6 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none were considered to be major deficiencies. This tells you that CMS didn't consider any of these deficiencies to be an imminent risk to resident health or safety. A couple of minor deficiencies shouldn't stop you from considering a nursing home.

This facility's next best area is its short-term care score, where it was given a C. Short-term care grades are commonly used to judge a facility's performance with rehabilitation. To provide highly rated rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally need to offer higher levels of highly skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other highly skilled individuals. In this facility's case, we were surprised to learn that it actually provides less registered nurse and physical therapist hours per patient than the average facility. The last datapoint we looked at in this area is the number of patients that who were able to eventually return home from the facility. We found that just 4.8 percent of this facility's residents returned home. This figure was below average.

Turning to the area of long-term care, this facility was given just a D in this category. For prospective residents in need of a permanent place to live rather than skilled nursing, long-term care grades are an important measure. Once we looked at the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we turned to the facility's vaccination statistics. This nursing home vaccinated 98.93939 percent of its patients against pneumonia, which is better than most nursing homes. Surprisingly, this facility also keeps its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had just 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days. Unfortunately, a few of its other scores in this category were not as favorable as these.

Turning to our next category, we awarded this nursing home a grade of D for our nursing category. This was the facility's least impressive category grade. In computing our nursing grades, we analyze both nursing hours and the training levels of those nurses. With a meager 0.3 hours of nursing care per patient on a daily basis, this place's nurse staffing levels were quite a bit below the national average. In addition to receiving below average scores for total nursing hours, this nursing home was a bit less impressive in some of the quality-based metrics we looked at in determining our nursing scores. We looked at the percent of residents experiencing pressure ulcers and found this facility was at approximately 1.5 times the national average in this metric. This is a bad sign when you consider that many pressure ulcers are believed to be preventable with better nursing care. Unfortunately, this statistic dragged down this facility's nursing rating significantly.