Aviva at Fitzsimons

In addition to being a quality facility overall, this facility excelled in our short-term care rating, where it earned a grade of A. Few facilities performed better in this category. Our short-term care ratings are presumably most meaningful for folks needing rehabilitation services. Rehabilitation typically requires higher levels of highly-skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes not merely nursing, but also physical and respiratory therapy, as well as other variations of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not every nursing home employs these skilled professionals. However, according to the data they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The final item we looked at in this category is the percentage of patients that who were able to eventually return home from the nursing home. We found that 6.6 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home as opposed to remaining at the nursing home on a permanent basis.

Adding to its impressive category grades, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A- for our inspections rating. Inspection grades weigh several factors, including deficiencies and substantiated complaints. You can learn more about each of these issues by obtaining copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. Unfortunately, we weren't able to find deficiency counts for this nursing home. We wish we had more data for this nursing home. Without information regarding deficiencies, it was challenging to evaluate this facility in this category.

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. When calculating our nursing grades, we assess both nursing hours and the skill levels of the nurses. This particular nursing home provided 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This nursing home performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a facility has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can generally be avoided if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

Moving on to our fourth area, we awarded this nursing home a D in long-term care. This is the nursing home's worst category grade. Sadly, this category pulled down the nursing home's overall profile a bit. Long-term care grades of this caliber generally are a bad sign for the quantity and quality of care provided by nurses and aids. In addition to considering the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. Candidly, we were a bit bothered by the fact that this facility provided the vaccine to only 62.31884 percent of its patients. To our surprise, this nursing home was actually decent at keeping its residents out of the hospital. It had just 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. This was its best feature in this category.