The Center at Lincoln

To go along with its strong overall grade, we gave this facility an A+ for its short-term care grade. In computing these short-term care grades, we assess the facility's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, respiratory therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. Our objective is to formulate a tool for sizing up the rehabilitation services of various facilities. Fortunately, it appear that this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not all nursing homes employs these types of nurses. However, according to the information this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The final datapoint we looked at in this area is the number of patients who were able to leave the facility and return home. We found that 6.6 percent of this facility's patients returned home.

This nursing home also received a very impressive nursing grade. In fact, this turned out to be its second best category grade. In that area, we awarded this facility a grade of A. Nursing grades are primarily associated with the nursing home's nurse staffing. This nursing home provides 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality-based metrics and this facility excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any nursing home Colorado in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can generally be prevented by providing better nursing care, such as employing a system of moving residents even once per day.

This facility has earned near flawless inspections in recent years. We gave them an impressive grade of A- in this area. Our inspection scores are tied to datapoints found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places that receive favorable grades in this area tend to have few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these places generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. This particular nursing home had just a single deficiency on its inspection report and it was not one deemed to pose a threat to patient health or safety. Even some of the best nursing homes receive an occasional ding on their inspection report.

The last area we graded is long-term care. We awarded this facility a solid score in this area, with a grade of B-. Although this was not as high as some of its other grades, it is still not the end of the world. In the category of long-term care, we weigh the amount of services offered by a facility, as opposed to more medically-intensive services. One of the data points we considered in addition to nursing hours is vaccinations. It doesn't look like this nursing home submitted information about vaccinations. Finally, this facility 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 an impressively low number.