Aviva at Fitzsimons

One of the many reasons this turned out to be a quality nursing home is that it received an A+ inspection grade. This is simply as good as it gets in this critical category. Perhaps the most significant factor we consider in determining our inspection scores is deficiencies. Deficiencies are found on a nursing home's inspection reports. Nursing homes with better scores in this category most likely dodged the most severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. We weren't able to track down deficiency counts for this nursing home. We wish we had more information about this facility. Without having complete information regarding deficiencies, it is challenging to fully evaluate it in this area.

This top notch facility also excelled in the category of short-term care, where we gave it a grade of A+. Only a small group of facilities fared better in this category. In the area of short-term care, we try to assess indicators of a facility's rehabilitation services. We analyze a nursing home's skilled nursing services, such as the ones performed by registered nurses and physical therapists. This nursing home is the gold standard in terms of skilled nursing staffing. It provided roughly one and a half times as many registered nurse and physical therapist hours per patient than the typical nursing home. This is what we like to find when grading a nursing home in this category. Finally, we looked at the number of patients who who were able to eventually return home from this facility. In addition to excelling in the area of physical therapy hours, we found that it fared as well as just about any facility with 68.8 percent of its patients returning home. Most nursing homes are below 50 percent in this statistic.

To complement its strong performance in other areas, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A+ for our inspections rating. Our nursing grade weighs a handful of components, but the main consideration is the number of nurse hours spent with patients. This nursing home provided 4.5 hours of nursing care per patient on a daily basis, which is among the highest totals in the country. A significant percentage of those hours were provided by registered nurses, which are one of the most skilled levels of nurses. We were very impressed by these figures. On top of offering high levels of care, this place also performed well in several of the quality-based metrics we looked at. In terms of the number of its residents suffering falls resulting in serious injury, this facility performed as well as any facility the nation.

The final category we analyzed is long-term care, where this facility received a grade of B-. Although this proved to be its worst category score, this is still not the end of the world. In determining our long-term care ratings, we look at the personal care received by a nursing home's residents. This nursing home's vaccination records were not as strong as its number of nursing hours per resident. This facility provided the pneumonia vaccine to just 87.80488 percent of its residents. We'd like to see some improvement herein this statistic next year. Nevertheless, this place excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.