Center at Northridge

Center at Northridge is located in Denver, Colorado, which features quite a few nursing homes. This facility appears to be ranked among the higher-rated nursing homes we looked at. A score in this range requires high-end marks across the board. We were so impressed with this nursing home that we ranked it in the top third of all facilities in the nation. The best part of this nursing home's impressive report card was its short-term care grade. We discuss short-term care in the next paragraph

In addition to faring well in its overall grade, this facility received high marks in the category of short-term care as well. As a result, it received our highest score in that category with an A+. In our short-term care assessment, we attempt to forge a fair barometer for rehabilitation services. In this process, we analyze a nursing home's scope of highly-skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as occupational therapy. This facility is the gold standard in terms of skilled nursing staffing. In fact, it supplied approximately one and a half times as many registered nurse and physical therapist hours per patient than the average facility. Finally, we looked at the number of residents who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that it outperformed the vast majority of nursing homes in the country in this area with 67.3 percent of its patients returning home. This is a significantly higher rate than most nursing homes.

In addition, this nursing home also received a nearly flawless inspection report. As a result, it earned one of our highest grades in that category with an A. Our inspection grades are tied to several items located in the a nursing home's government inspections. Places that score well in this area typically have few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these nursing homes generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. It does not appear that we have information about this nursing home's deficiencies. Without having complete deficiency related data for this facility, it ended up being a challenge to grade the place in the inspections category.

Another strong feature for this facility is that it received an impressive nursing grade. In that area, we awarded this facility a grade of B+. Our nursing score includes several factors, many of which are tied to quantities of nurse staffing. This place provided 4.9 hours of nursing care per resident on a daily basis, which is among the better totals in the country. A significant portion of those hours were provided by registered nurses, which are one of the most skilled levels of nurses. We are really impressed by both of these figures. In addition to providing impressive levels of nursing care, this nursing home also excelled in the quality measures we assessed. By way of illustration, it performed as well as any facility in the nation when it comes to avoiding major falls and pressure ulcers. We look at these areas as predictive measures of the quality of nursing care offered.

Moving on to the fourth category, this facility received a decent long-term care score. Even though this is not nearly as elite as many of its other category grades, this is truly not the end of the world. Our long-term care grades are more important for residents requiring more conventional services associated with activities of daily living. After considering the volume of care provided by nurses and other staff, we turned to the facility's vaccination data. We were not able to find information on vaccination rates. Lastly, this place was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.