Cherry Creek Nursing Center

Even though we graded this nursing home extremely poorly overall, it actually received a quality grade in the area of nursing. We awarded it a grade of B in that category. Our nursing grade is based on many subcategories, most of which are associated with quantities of nurse staffing. This particular nursing home provided 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This facility performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a nursing home has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can many times be avoided if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

Sadly, this facility's next best category was inspections, but even there it received just a D. This is still a very poor grade. Inspection scores factor in many items on the nursing home's recent inspection reports. When you find too many deficiencies on the inspection reports, this is typically the worst sign. Severe deficiencies indicate a risk to patient safety. This particular nursing home was hit with one deficiency on its inspection report. Fortunately, it wasn't in a category that suggests that it created a threat to patient health or safety. Lastly, we also want to draw your attention to the fact that this nursing home was assessed significant government fines recently of over $100,000. This typically indicates that a nursing home'spoor track record spanned multiple years.

This nursing home's second worse category is long-term care, where it earned just a D in that area. This is a well below average grade. In a long-term care setting, the nursing home's primary goal 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 residents. Once we finished looking at the amount of care provided by nurses, we then analyzed the nursing home's vaccination record. We were optimistic to find that this nursing home vaccinates 95 percent of its patients against pneumonia. Surprisingly, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. With just 0.02 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, this nursing home had fewer hospitalizations than the majority of nursing homes. Sadly, some of its other scores in the category weren't as favorable as these.

The last area we rated was short-term care. Sadly, it received an abysmal F for this category, which is a very poor grade. In determining these short-term care ratings, we assess the nursing home's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses, speech therapists, physical therapists and other types of skilled professionals. The goal is to formulate a measure for sizing up the rehabilitation services of different facilities. With a score of this caliber in this category, we weren't shocked to discover that this nursing home was below average in the two key staffing figures we focus on. The nursing home provided substantially fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than most other nursing homes. Finally, we looked at the number of residents who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that just 3.8 percent of this facility's residents returned home.