Advanced Health Care of Aurora

On top of faring well in its overall grade, this facility received high marks in the area of short-term care as well. As a result, it received our highest grade in that category with an A+. Our short-term care ratings are likely most critical for folks needing a nursing home for rehabilitation. Rehabilitation usually requires additional highly-skilled nursing. Skilled nursing means not merely nursing services, but also physical and speech therapy, as well as other variations of therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not every facility employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, according to the information this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The last metric we considered in this area is the percentage of residents who were able to return home from the facility. We found that 7.4 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home as opposed to remaining at the facility on a permanent basis.

This facility also earned an A+ inspection score, making it one of the few nursing homes to receive multiple A+'s in our categories. This is based on the place's recent government inspections. An A+ in this category is one of the highest complements we can pay to a facility. Inspection grades are based on many pieces of information located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Facilities that receive favorable grades in this area tend to have very few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these places should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. While this facility had a few minor dings on its inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means the government inspectors did not deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

We also want to emphasize the fact that this facility was given a top-shelf grade of A in our long-term care area. For long-term care residents, the nursing home's primary goal is to maintain residents' quality of life and keep them safe. In addition to looking at the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we analyzed the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. Unfortunately, we were not able to track down this facility's vaccination rates. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

In our final area, this facility also received a very strong nursing rating, with a grade of A-. This finished off a rare straight A profile. Nursing scores are heavily correlated with nurse staffing levels. This nursing home provides 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also assessed certain nursing quality-based metrics in computing our nursing grades. These include minimizing residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We view these statistics as good indicators of the caliber of nursing care offered, since better care tends to reduce these problems.