Forest Ridge

Forest Ridge is an average-sized nursing home located in Woodland Park, Colorado. This facility is one of the most elite nursing homes we assessed. A grade of this caliber requires superb scores across the board. We were impressed enough to rate this facility as one of the 50 best facilities in Colorado. One of the major highlights of this facility's remarkable report card is its inspection grade. Inspection reports are discussed in the next paragraph.

To go along with a favorable overall grade, we gave this facility an A+ for our inspection category. Inspection grades weigh a host of factors found on a nursing home's inspection report. One of the most important criteria we look at is the quantity and severity of deficiencies. Facilities with higher grades in this area generally have few severe deficiencies. It doesn't appear that we have deficiency counts for this nursing home. We would like to have more information about this nursing home. Without having access to all of the deficiency related data, it was challenging to grade the place in the inspections category.

One of the other reasons we rated this facility so highly is that it earned a very impressive nursing grade. In that category, we gave this facility an A+. The nursing score includes several components, but the most important one is the level of nurse hours per patient per week. This nursing home provided 3.8 hours of nursing care per resident each day. About a quarter of these hours were provided by registered nurses, which are among the most skilled levels of nurses. This is a high percentage of skilled nursing care. We weight these hours performed by skilled nurses more in determining our nursing scores. Lastly, we also looked at a few quality measures in determining our nursing grades. This place excelled in these areas, with excellent scores for minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. These areas are generally reliable indicators of the quality of nursing care a facility provides.

This nursing home also was superb in the category of short-term care, where we awarded it a grade of A. Few facilities received a better grade in this area. Our short-term care scores are crucial for patients looking for rehabilitation. Rehabilitation usually requires additional highly-skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing means a broad range of nursing services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, as well as other variations of therapy. This facility elevated its grade in this area by offering more care from registered nurses than a typical facility. The final datapoint we looked at in this category is the number of residents who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. It performed as well as just about any nursing home in Colorado in this area with 64.4 percent of its patients returning home.

The next category we assessed is long-term care. This nursing home was given an impressive nursing grade in our assessment, with a B. Even though this was not nearly as elite as some of its other grades, this remains one of our better scores for that area. For patients seeking a permanent residence as opposed to skilled nursing, long-term care is a very important category. One of the criteria we considered after nursing hours was vaccinations. This nursing home provided the pneumonia vaccination to 34.666668 percent of its residents. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0.78 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.