Gunnison Valley Health Senior Care Center

In addition to being a first rate nursing home overall, this facility also performed well in long-term care, where it earned an impressive grade of A+. Few facilities fared better in this area. When facilities receive this kind of score in this category it is a good sign for patient care and indicates that the facility is well-staffed with nurses aids. After looking at the volume of care provided by nurses and other staff, we next considered the nursing home's vaccination statistics. This facility vaccinated 100 percent of its patients for pneumonia, which is far higher than the vast majority of nursing homes. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0.02 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

One of the other reasons we rated this facility so highly is that it earned a very impressive nursing score. In that area, we gave this nursing home an A. When determining our nursing ratings, we weigh both the number of hours nurses spend with residents and the levels of licensure of the nurses. This nursing home averages 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality measures and this facility excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any place the state in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can frequently be avoided by providing better nursing care, such as by having a system of turning a resident more often.

Turning to our inspection category, this facility excelled in that category, which is based on the nursing home's recent government inspection reports. In fact, we awarded it an A for that category. Inspection ratings account for several factors found on a nursing home's inspection report. One key criteria we consider is the quantity and severity of deficiencies. Nursing homes with higher grades in this category typically have few of these severe deficiencies. Amazingly, this was one of the few nursing homes in the country that had no deficiencies whatsoever on its inspection report. This is very impressive. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Switching gears to our next area, this nursing home received a very strong short-term care rating. We gave it a grade of A- in this category, rounding out a straight A profile. Short-term care ratings are based in part on a facility's quantity of highly-skilled skilled healthcare professionals. This includes a broad scope of services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and occupational therapists, as well as other variations of therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not every facility employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, based on the data they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The last datapoint we considered in this area is the number of residents that eventually returned home from the facility. We found that 0 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home as opposed to remaining at the facility on a permanent basis.