Salem West Healthcare Center

While this nursing home's overall score was not a highlight, it actually really excelled in the category of inspections. In fact, we awarded it an A for that category, which is one of our best scores. Perhaps the most critical factor we look at in calculating our inspection ratings is deficiencies. These deficiencies can be found on a facility's recent inspection reports. It is typically best to avoid facilities that have a long list of deficiencies. This particular nursing home received 3 deficiencies on its inspection report. Overall, this is still a solid inspection report, but we'd always recommend looking into any deficiencies you find troubling.

This facilities next most favorable area was long-term care. We awarded it a grade of C in this category. This is basically a middle of the pack grade in this category. If you are looking for anything other than short-term rehabilitation, you should take a close look at each facility's long-term care ratings. On top of assessing the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home provided the vaccine to 95.21531 percent of its patients. This place also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. It had only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

Tragically, this facility received an F for its short-term care score. In calculating our short-term care grades, we analyze a nursing home's levels of skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists respiratory therapists and other highly trained professionals. This area is typically a reliable measure of the nursing home's ability to rehabilitate patients. Given its score in this category, we weren't stunned to learn that this nursing home is well below average in terms of its quantity of registered nurse and physical therapy hours provided to its residents based on the figures we looked at. Frankly, this was what we expected to find. The last metric we looked at in this category is the number of residents that returned home from the nursing home. This facility struggled quite a bit in this area as well, with just 4 percent of its patients returning home. Unfortunately, this was quite a bit below average.

The next area we rated is nursing. Sadly, it received a lowly F for this category, which is a poor score. In computing a nursing home's nursing grade, we weigh the amount of time nurses are caring for residents and the skill levels of the nurses. This particular facility provided a meager 0.3 hours of nursing care per patient each day. This number is far below the national average. To go along with its low totals in the area of nursing hours per patient, this nursing home also didn't perform as well in the quality-based measures we looked at in calculating our nursing scores. We looked at the percent of residents experiencing major falls and pressure ulcers. This facility had more falls and pressure ulcers than the average nursing home.