Salem Hills Rehabilitation and Nursing Center

The primary reason this nursing home received a decent overall grade is its impeccable government inspections in recent years. We gave them one of our higher scores in that category, with a grade of A+. This is a notably better grade than the place's overall score, which was decent but certainly not elite. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in calculating our inspection ratings. One critical factor is health deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of the deficiencies is arguably more important than the number of deficiencies, as some of these can be quite minor. This particular nursing home had just a single deficiency on its inspection report and it was not one deemed to pose a threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Additionally, we awarded this nursing home a grade of B+ in our long-term care category. This happens to be one of our more impressive grades. If you are looking for services other than short-term rehabilitation, you should take a close look at each facility's long-term care grades. On top of looking at the volume of care provided by nurses and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility administered the vaccine to 78.66972 percent of its patients. This is somewhat lower than we expected. While its vaccination rate was a bit lower than we hoped for, we were pleased to find nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

This nursing home received a strong nursing rating this year as well. It earned one of our better scores in that area with a F. The nursing grade includes a variety of subcategories. The most heavily weighted factor is the quantity of hours nurses spent with patients. This nursing home offered just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident daily. This is well below average. Lastly, we also looked at some nursing quality-based metrics in calculating our nursing grades. This place performed well when it comes to avoiding major falls and pressure ulcers. Many consider these metrics to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

The next category we analyzed is short-term care. We gave it an F in this category, which is an abysmal grade. This is certainly a significant concern. In computing our short-term care grades, we quantify the facility's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, occupational therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. The goal is to create a scale for comparing the rehabilitation services of different facilities. Unfortunately, we found that this nursing home provided fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than most other facilities. Finally, we considered the number of residents who ultimately were able to return home from this facility. This nursing home didn't fare well here either. In fact, we found that just 3.4 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home. This figure was quite a bit off the national average.