Denver Sunset Home

One of the many reasons this turned out to be a great nursing home is that it received an A+ long-term care grade. This is simply as good as it gets in this category. Facilities that receive this kind of grade in this category typically provide consistent around the clock care to make sure residents are kept in good health. In addition to looking at the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home administered the vaccine to 100 percent of its residents, which is very impressive. Pneumonia is often a dangerous ailment for nursing home residents so we strongly prefer when a nursing home doesn't roll the dice on this issue. Lastly, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

Adding to its impressive category grades, this facility also excelled in the area of inspections, where it received a grade of A. Our inspection scores are based on several items located in the a nursing home's recent inspections. Nursing homes that receive favorable grades in this category typically have very few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these facilities generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. This facility was hit with 4 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none were considered severe. This means that the inspectors did not consider any of the deficiencies to create an imminent threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Adding to its strong resume, this facility also received an excellent nursing score, with a grade of A-. We looked at the levels of nurses at the nursing home, in addition to the number of hours those nurses spent with residents, in calculating our score in this category. This nursing home averages 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at some nursing quality measures in determining our nursing grades. This nursing home performed very well in terms of minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

In the last category we scored, this facility received a very strong grade of A- in our short-term care category. With this score, the nursing home topped off a straight A profile. In the category of short-term care, we seek to qualify indicators of a facility's rehabilitation. We look at the facility's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses and physical and occupational therapists. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not all nursing homes employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, according to the data they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The final datapoint we considered in this category is the number of residents who were able to return home from the facility. We found that 0 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home as opposed to remaining at the facility on a permanent basis.