Colonnades Health Care Center

One of the many reasons this place received a great overall grade is that it received an A+ in short-term care. Short-term care grades are typically employed to assess a nursing home's performance with rehabilitation. In order to offer good rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally need to feature better levels of skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other licensed professionals. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not every nursing home employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, according to the information this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Lastly, we looked at the number of residents who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 7.8 percent of this facility's patients returned home.

This nursing home also received an A+ inspection grade, making it one of the rare nursing homes to receive multiple A+'s in our category grades. Inspection scores take several factors into consideration, including deficiencies and substantiated complaints. You can find more information about each of these issues by reviewing copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. While this facility had a few deficiencies on its report, none of them were serious based on CMS' deficiency scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Another reason we rated this nursing home so highly is that it received an A+ nursing grade. This is simply as good as it gets in this category. Our nursing grade is primarily associated with a nursing home's level of nurse staffing. This particular nursing home provided 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed some nursing quality-based metrics in determining our nursing grades. This facility performed very well when it comes to avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

The fourth area we looked at was long-term care, where this nursing home was given an A. This completed a very favorable report card. Only a select few facilities received an A- or better in each of our categories. In a long-term care environment, the nursing home's 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 residents. In addition to considering the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. We were not able to locate information about this nursing home's vaccination rates. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.