Colorado State Veterans Home at Fitzsimons

In addition to receiving a great overall grade, this nursing home received an A+ for nursing. The nursing category weighs a handful of components, many of which are based on nursing hours. This nursing home averages 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality-based metrics and this nursing home excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any place the state in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can generally be prevented by offering better nursing care, such as by employing a system of turning a patient more often.

This first-rate nursing home also performed well in the area of long-term care, where we gave it a grade of A+. Very few facilities performed better in this area. When nursing homes receive a grade in this range in long-term care it typically means it has plenty of staff and is a quality place to reside on a permanent basis. Once we assessed the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we next considered the facility's vaccination data. This facility vaccinated 94.117645 percent of its patients against pneumonia, which is higher than the average nursing home. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

Turning the page to our next category, this facility received a strong short-term care score. In fact, it received a grade of A- in that category. Our short-term care grades are considered to be more meaningful for folks in need of rehabilitation services. Rehabilitation generally requires additional skilled nursing. Skilled nursing means not merely nursing services, but also physical and respiratory therapy, as well as other variations of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not all nursing homes employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, based on the information this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The last measure we looked at in this category is the number of patients who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We discovered that 0 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.

Turning to our inspection category, this facility excelled in that area, which is based on the facility's recent inspection reports. We gave it a grade of A- for that category. This finished off its straight A report card. Arguably the most critical factor we look at in calculating our inspection grades is deficiencies. Deficiencies can be found on a nursing home's inspection reports. Facilities with better grades in this category most likely dodged the most severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. Fortunately, although this facility had a few minor dings on its government inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are found in categories G through L. This means that the inspectors didn't deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.