Silver Memories Health Care

One of the many reasons this turned out to be a quality nursing home is that it received an A+ inspection grade. This is simply as good as it gets in this critical category. Perhaps the most critical factor we look at in determining our inspection scores is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a facility's recent inspection reports. Facilities with better scores in this category most likely avoided the most severe deficiencies involving health risks or even death. This nursing home was hit with 6 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none of the deficiencies were considered to be severe. This tells you that CMS didn't consider any of these deficiencies to cause an imminent risk to resident safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

An additional quality feature for this facility is that it was given a favorable long-term care grade. In fact, this turned out to be its second best category score. In that category, we awarded this nursing home a B+. When facilities receive this type of score in long-term care it is a good sign for resident care and indicates that the facility is well-staffed with nurses and aids. One of the criteria we considered after nursing hours was vaccinations. This nursing home provided the pneumonia vaccine to 100 percent of its patients. Vaccination is a proven method to minimize unnecessary deaths and hospitalizations for the nursing home population. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

Adding to its profile, this facility also earned a grade of B for its nursing rating. This is a well above average score in this category. In computing our nursing ratings, we weigh both staffing levels and the skill levels of the nurses. This nursing home averages 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality measures and this facility excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any place the nation in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can typically be avoided by offering better nursing care, such as by employing a system of moving a resident even once per day.

The final area we rated is this facility's worst area. Nevertheless, even in its weakest link we still awarded it a decent grade of B- in short-term care. Our short-term care grade is often used to assess a facility's performance with rehabilitation. To provide quality rehabilitation services, facilities generally need to feature better levels of skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists and other highly trained professionals. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not all nursing homes employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, based on the data this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Finally, we considered the number of residents who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 0 percent of this facility's residents returned home. At most facilities, closer to half of their patients are able to return home so this figure is below average.