Aviva at Fitzsimons

One of the reasons this place ended up being a quality nursing home is that it earned an A+ inspection grade. This is simply as good as it gets in this critical area. Inspection scores take several factors into consideration, including deficiencies and substantiated complaints. You can learn more about each of these issues by obtaining copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. It doesn't look like we were able to find information about this nursing home's deficiencies. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Adding to its high-end profile, this facility also received a strong long-term care grade, with a grade of A. If you are looking for services other than rehabilitation, you should take a close look at each nursing home's long-term care ratings. In addition to assessing the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility gave the vaccine to 84.84849 percent of its patients. This is a bit lower than we expected. While its vaccination rate was a bit lower than we had hoped, at least this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. It had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

This nursing home also received a very impressive short-term care score. Indeed, this is its third strongest category score. In that category, this facility received a grade of A. Short-term care grades are commonly used to grade a facility's performance with rehabilitation In order to offer high-end rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally need to offer higher levels of highly skilled nursing. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other highly trained professionals. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not every facility employs these types of nurses. However, based on the information they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Lastly, we assessed the percentage of residents who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 6.4 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.

In the final area, this facility also was awarded an impressive nursing score, with a grade of B+. This topped off a very impressive report card. When determining a nursing home's nursing grade, we assess the number of hours nurses are seeing patients as well as the level of licensure of the nurses. This nursing home provides 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality-based metrics and this nursing home excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any facility the state in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can many times be prevented by providing better nursing care, such as employing a policy of moving patients even once per day.