Aviva at Fitzsimons

Aviva at Fitzsimons is an average-sized nursing home located in Aurora, Colorado. Featuring an overall score of A, this is clearly a first-rate facility. In fact, this facility has the distinction of being one of the top 100 nursing homes in Colorado. This is an impressive accomplishment in a state with a long list of high-end facilities. Headlining this facility's stellar report card is its inspection grade, which we will address in the next paragraph.

With an overall grade this high, it should come as no surprise that this nursing home performed well in inspections, where it received an A. Perhaps the most important factor we look at in computing our inspection grades is deficiencies. Deficiencies are found on a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Facilities with higher scores in this area typically avoided the more severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. We weren't able to find information about this nursing home's deficiencies. Without having the deficiency data for this nursing home, it is a challenge to evaluate the place in the inspections category.

Among its many impressive grades, this facility received an excellent nursing grade. In fact, we gave it a grade of A in that category. Nursing scores are primarily associated with the facility's level of nurse staffing. This nursing home provides an incredible 6 hours of nursing care per resident daily. Very few nursing homes provide this quantity of nursing care to their patients. Out of this total, many of the hours were provided by registered nurses, which is one of the most highly trained levels of nurses. In addition to offering high levels of nursing care, this facility also excelled in the quality-based metrics we assessed. For example, it performed as well as any facility in the state in the area of avoiding major falls and pressure ulcers. We look at these statistics as reliable indicators of the caliber of nursing care provided.

Turning the page to our next category, this facility was given a strong short-term care score. In fact, we awarded it a grade of A in that category. In computing these short-term care grades, we quantify the nursing home's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, occupational therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. Our objective is to create a tool for sizing up the rehabilitation services of various facilities. Remarkably, this nursing home provides about 50% more hours of services from physical therapists and registered nurses than most nursing homes we assessed. This is an encouraging sign. Lastly, we looked at the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 0 percent of this facility's patients returned home.

The last category we rated is long-term care, where this nursing home was given a B-. While this ended up being its worst category grade, this is still not a terrible score. In determining these long-term care scores, we quantify the nursing home's ability to maintain its permanent residents' health and quality of life. After looking at the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we then analyzed the nursing home's vaccination record. Unfortunately, we were not able to find this facility's vaccination rates. Finally, this nursing home keeps its patients out of the hospital. It had only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.