Advanced Health Care of Colorado Springs

To go along with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A+ for our inspections rating. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in computing our inspection scores. One of those factors is deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of deficiencies is arguably more meaningful than the number of deficiencies, as some of these end up being quite insignificant. It doesn't appear that we have information on deficiency's for this nursing home. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

We also wanted to note the fact that this facility excelled in our short-term care category. We awarded them a dominant score of A+ in this area. Our short-term care grade is often used to score a facility's performance with rehabilitation. To have highly rated rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally need to offer higher levels of highly skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists and other highly skilled individuals. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not every facility employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, according to the information they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Lastly, we assessed the number of patients who who were able to eventually return home from this facility. We found that 7.5 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.

Adding to its high-end assessment, this facility also was given a strong long-term care score, with a grade of A. If you are looking for anything other than rehabilitation, you should take a close look at long-term care ratings. One of the factors we considered on top of nursing hours is vaccines. Unfortunately, it does not appear that this facility provided vaccination data. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. It had only 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

The last area we rated was nursing, where this nursing home was awarded an A. This finished off a very impressive report card. Not many nursing homes earned an A- or better in every single category. Nursing grades are heavily correlated with quantity of nursing care available. This nursing home provides 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed certain nursing quality measures in computing our nursing grades. These include minimizing residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We look at these metrics as good indicators of the caliber of nursing care offered, since better care tends to reduce these problems.