Accel at Golden Ridge

Accel at Golden Ridge is an average-sized nursing home located in Golden, Colorado. Featuring an overall score of B+, this looks like a very good nursing home. Based on our assessment, you can do much worse than this facility. The best part of this facility's impressive profile is its short-term care grade. short-term care grades are discussed in the next section

On top of earning a great overall grade, this facility received an A+ in the area of short-term care. Our short-term care ratings are based in part on a nursing home's quantity of highly-skilled nursing services. This includes a broad range of services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and occupational therapists, as well as other forms of therapy. This facility excelled at the highest level in the two key staffing areas we looked at. It offered about 50% more care from physical therapists and registered nurses than the average nursing home. This is an excellent sign. Finally, we looked at the number of patients that returned home from this facility. On top of excelling in the area of physical therapy staffing, we found that it fared as well as just about any facility in the country with 62.2 percent of its residents returning home. Most nursing homes are below 50 percent in this statistic.

Adding to its impressive profile, this nursing home also performed well in the area of inspections. In fact, it received a nearly flawless government inspection report this year. As a result, it received one of our best grades in that area with an A. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in computing our inspection grades. One of those factors is health deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of the deficiencies is usually more meaningful than the number of deficiencies, as some deficiencies 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. Even some of the best nursing homes receive an occasional ding on their inspection report.

This facility is also strong in the area of nursing, where it received a grade of B+. It outperformed most nursing homes in this category. Nursing grades are tied to quality and quantity of nursing care. This facility provided 3.8 hours of nursing care per resident on a daily basis. Approximately a quarter of those hours were provided by registered nurses, which are among the most skilled nurses. This is a high ratio of skilled nursing care. We weight these hours performed by skilled nurses more in computing our nursing scores. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality-based metrics 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 nursing home Colorado in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can frequently be avoided by providing better nursing care, such as by having a policy of turning a patient at least once a day.

This facility's weakest area is long-term care, which is the last area we looked at. Unfortunately, we gave it an F in this area. Despite a few excellent scores in other categories, this score is still a bit of a concern so we would like to to point it out. When nursing homes receive a grade in this range in this category it typically means the facility did not perform well in our measures relating to resident care. On top of looking at the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. We were not able to locate this place's vaccination data. To our surprise, this nursing home was actually able to limit hospitalizations. With only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, this facility had fewer hospitalizations than many nursing homes. This was its best score in this category.