Aviva at Fitzsimons

One of the reasons this place turned out to be a quality nursing home is it received an A+ in our inspections category. This is as good as it gets in this critical area. Our inspection grades account for several factors included in a nursing home's inspection reports. One key criteria we consider is the number and severity of deficiencies. Places with better grades in this category usually have very few of these severe deficiencies. We weren't able to find deficiency counts for this nursing home. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Among its many elite grades, this nursing home was awarded first-rate short-term care grade. In fact, it received a grade of A in this area. In our short-term care category, we seek to craft a sound gauge for rehabilitation services. In doing so, we look at the facility's level of highly-skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as occupational therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this facility employs registered nurses. Not every facility employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, based on the information they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The last statistic we looked at in this category is the percentage of residents that ultimately returned home from the facility. We found that 6.4 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home as opposed to remaining at the nursing home on a permanent basis.

This facility also excelled in the area of nursing, where it received a grade of A. Few nursing homes performed better in this area. There are a variety of criteria within this grade. Most of these subcategories are tied to the quantity of nurse staffing. This facility 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 place performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a place has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can many times be avoided if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

In the final category, we gave this nursing home an A+ for its long-term care grade. This finished off an elite report card. For prospective residents in need of a permanent residence as opposed to rehabilitation, long-term care grades are very important. On top of considering the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility administered the vaccine to 91.176476 percent of its residents. This is somewhat below what we expected but still a decent figure. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.