Salem Transitional Care

This facility received a strong overall grade as described above, but we wanted to emphasize its excellent short-term care score. We awarded them an A in this area. In determining our short-term care ratings, we assess the facility's levels of highly skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists speech therapists and other licensed professionals. This score is more often than not a reliable assessment of a nursing home's rehabilitation services. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not every facility employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, according to the data they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The final datapoint we assessed in this area is the percentage of patients who were able to leave the facility and return home. We discovered that 6.7 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.

In addition, this nursing home also performed well in our inspection category, which is based on the facility's inspection reports. We gave it an A- for that area. Perhaps the most critical factor we consider in determining our inspection scores is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Facilities with better grades in this area typically avoided the most severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. Fortunately, although this nursing home had some minor dings on its inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means CMS didn't deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. A couple minor deficiencies aren't necessarily something to panic about.

The next highest grade we gave this nursing home came in the category of nursing, where we gave it a grade of B-. This wasn't quite as good as some of its other scores, but a grade in this range is not the end of the world. Our nursing rating is based on the facility's nurse staffing levels. We consider both the levels of skill of the nurses and the quantity of hours spent with residents. This nursing home provides 0.5 hours of nursing care per patient on a daily basis. This is a much lower figure than we were hoping for. Lastly, despite not having the most impressive total nursing hours per resident, this place actually performed admirably in the area of preventing major falls. This is often a reliable indicator that a place has sufficient quality controls in place.

Moving on to our last area, this nursing home was awarded a C for long-term care, which is generally a decent score. For patients in need of a permanent place to live as opposed to rehabilitation, long-term care is a very important category. One of the criteria we considered on top of nursing hours was vaccinations. Fortunately, this facility provided the pneumonia vaccine to 100 percent of its residents. Finally, this facility was also able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.