Brookdale Denver

Brookdale Denver is a small facility in Denver, Colorado. We awarded this facility an overall grade of B+. A grade in this range requires solid scores in most areas. Even in a city featuring 43 other nursing homes, this facility really stands out. This facility's impressive profile was highlighted by its short-term care score, which we will address in the next paragraph.

We also found that this nursing home excelled in our short-term care rating. We gave them an A+ in this area. Our short-term care ratings are believed to be more important for individuals needing rehabilitation services. Rehabilitation usually utilizes higher levels of skilled nursing. This includes not just nursing services, but also physical and occupational therapy, as well as other types of therapy. This nursing home is above the national average both in terms of its quantity of physical therapy and registered nurse hours provided to its residents. These are generally good indicators of quality short-term care. The final item we looked at in this area is the number of patients who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We found that it fared as well as just about any facility in Colorado in this area with 71.3 percent of its patients returning home.

We also wanted to emphasize the fact that this facility excelled in our nursing rating. We awarded them an impressive grade of A+ in this category. There are quite a few datapoints within this grade. Most of the datapoints reflect nurse staffing. This facility boasts a really impressive 5 hours of nursing care per patient each day, of which a significant portion of those hours were provided by registered nurses. This is one of the more highly trained levels of nurses. On top of providing high levels of nursing care, this facility also performed well in several of the quality-based metrics we assessed. In terms of the percentage of its patients suffering falls resulting in major injury, this facility performed as well as any facility Colorado.

In addition, this facility also excelled in the category of inspections, where it earned an impressive grade of B+. Few facilities performed better in this category. Arguably the most significant factor we consider in determining our inspection scores is deficiencies. These deficiencies can be found on a nursing home's inspection reports. Facilities with higher scores in this area typically avoided the more severe deficiencies involving health risks or even death. While this facility had some deficiencies on its inspection report, none were severe based on CMS' deficiency scale. The fact that the deficiencies were relatively minor leaves us less concerned with this inspection report.

This nursing home's worst category is long-term care, which is the final category we looked at. Unfortunately, we gave it an abysmal F in this category. In spite of multiple impressive grades in other categories, this score is nevertheless somewhat concerning so we felt obligated to make a note of it. For long-term care residents, the primary objective is to keep patients as healthy and safe as possible. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate patients. On top of offering favorable levels of nurse staffing, this nursing home gave the pneumonia vaccine to 97.72727 percent of its residents. These scores are notably more respectable than some of its other data points in the category. Surprisingly, this nursing home also fared well at keeping its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had just 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. Sadly, a few of its other scores in the category were not as favorable as these.