Columbine West Health and Rehab Facility

Columbine West Health and Rehab Facility is one of nine available facilities located in Fort Collins, Colorado. This is a fine nursing home. We awarded this it an overall grade of B+, which is very good score. Indeed, this is better than most of the nursing homes in Fort Collins. The best aspect of this facility's strong report card was its short-term care grade. We discuss short-term care in the next paragraph

In addition to earning a strong overall score, this nursing home also earned an elite short-term care grade. We awarded them one of our better scores in that area, with an A. In calculating our short-term care ratings, we scrutinize a facility's levels of highly skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists occupational therapists and other types of therapists. This area is frequently a reliable assessment of a nursing home's rehabilitation. When we assessed this facility's nursing hours, we found it offered substantially more care from registered nurses than most nursing homes. Finally, we looked at the number of patients who returned to the community from this facility. We found that it outperformed the vast majority of nursing homes in the country with 56.9 percent of its patients returning home.

This nursing home also excelled in inspections. We awarded it an A for that category. Inspection scores are tied to many datapoints located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Facilities that excel in this area tend to have very few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these nursing homes should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. While this facility had a few minor dings on its report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones found in categories G through L. This tells you CMS didn't consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. We should note that deficiency-free inspections are rare in this industry.

Among this facility's other strengths is its elite nursing grade. We awarded them one of our better scores in that area, with a grade of A-. There are a variety of factors within this grade. Most of these subcategories relate to the quantity and quality of nurse staffing. This facility boasts a really impressive 4.3 hours of nursing care per patient per day, of which a significant percentage of those hours were provided by registered nurses. This is one of the most highly highly trained levels of nurses. This is one of the higher totals of nursing hours we found at any facility. In addition to looking at levels of nursing care, we also looked at a few quality-based metrics in determining our nursing grades. These include minimizing residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We view these datapoints as good indicators of the caliber of nursing care being provided, since better care tends to reduce these problems.

The last category we rated is long-term care. Sadly, it received an abysmal F in this category, which is a bottom of the barrel score. You shouldn't necessarily disregard a nursing home as a result of a single poor category though. In a long-term care environment, the primary goal is to keep patients healthy and safe. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate residents. On top of offering favorable levels of nursing care, this nursing home administered the pneumonia vaccine to 95.39877 percent of its residents. These scores are obviously more impressive than several of its other marks in this category. To our surprise, this nursing home also keeps its residents out of the hospital. It had only 1.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days. Sadly, a few of its other scores in the category weren't as favorable as these.