Denver North Care Center

To pair with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A+ for its nursing grade. In a long-term care environment, the facility's 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 patients. After assessing the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we turned to the nursing home's vaccination data. This facility vaccinated 65.18771 percent of its patients against pneumonia, which is a few points less than we anticipated but still a decent figure. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

Adding to its impressive category grades, this nursing home excelled in the area of inspections, where it earned an A. Not many nursing homes performed better in this area. Inspection grades take several factors into consideration, including deficiencies and federal fines. You can learn more about each of these factors by obtaining copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. 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.

Another one of this facility's impressive category grades came in the area of nursing care. We awarded them one of our better scores in that area, with a grade of B+. Nursing grades are tied to quantity of nursing care available. This facility 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 place 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 often be prevented if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

The next category we scored is this facility's weakest category. Nevertheless, even in its worst category we still gave it a decent grade of B- for short-term care. Short-term care grades are generally used to grade a facility's rehabilitation services. To provide highly graded rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally must feature better levels of highly skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other types of therapists. It does not look like this facility provided registered nurse or physical therapist staffing data. The last item we assessed in this category is the percentage of patients who returned home from the facility. We found that just 0 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.