Colorow Care Center

To go along with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A for our inspections rating. Our inspection grades are tied to items located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes that excel in this area tend to have few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these places should 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. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This facility was awarded a strong long-term care score as well. We awarded it one of our higher scores in that area with a score of B+. Long-term care grades of this caliber generally require both around the clock care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine medical care. On top of assessing the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we analyzed the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home gave the vaccine to 100 percent of its residents, which is far higher than the vast majority of nursing homes. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

The next area we looked at is short-term care. This nursing home received an impressive short-term care score, with a grade of B in the area. In calculating our short-term care scores, we look at a nursing home's levels of skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists respiratory therapists and other licensed professionals. This category is typically a solid assessment of a nursing home's rehabilitation. It doesn't appear that this facility provided information about its staffing of registered nurses or physical therapists. The final measure we assessed in this area is the number of residents that eventually returned home from the nursing home. We found that 5.8 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home as opposed to remaining at the nursing home on a permanent basis.

Our final area is nursing, in which we gave this facility a C in that category. Nursing scores are primarily associated with the nursing home's level of nurse staffing. This facility provided just 0.2 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a relatively low total compared to most other facilities. Lastly, our nursing scores also consider quality-based assessments, such as preventing major falls. Despite not having the highest total nursing hours per resident, this facility actually performed admirably in the metric of preventing major falls. This is often a good indicator that a nursing home has quality controls in place. Some falls can be avoided if a nursing home provides enough nurses aids to assist its residents.