Life Care Center of Pueblo

In addition to receiving a great overall score, this facility excelled in our shot-term care category. In fact, we awarded it an impressive grade of A for that category. Short-term care grades are typically used to grade a nursing home's rehabilitation services. In order to provide high-end rehabilitation services, facilities generally need to have higher levels of skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists and other highly trained professionals. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not all nursing homes employs these skilled professionals. However, according to the information this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The last metric we considered in this category is the percentage of patients who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We discovered that 5.8 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.

One of the other reasons we rated this facility so highly is that it received a very impressive nursing grade. Nursing turned out to be its second best category grade. In that category, we gave this nursing home a grade of A-. When calculating a nursing home's nursing score, we look at the amount of time nurses commit to patients as well as the level of skill of the nurses. This facility provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also assessed some nursing quality measures in determining our nursing grades. This nursing home performed very well when it comes to minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

We awarded this facility an A- for inspections. Inspection scores account for a host of factors found on a facility's inspection report. One of the most important criteria we weigh heavily is the quantity and severity of deficiencies. Places with better scores in this area typically have few of these severe deficiencies. While this place had a few deficiencies on its government inspection report, none were serious based on CMS' deficiency scale. Keep in mind that deficiency-free inspections are uncommon in the industry.

The final category we assessed is long-term care. In that category, we awarded this facility a strong grade of B. In a long-term care environment, the primary goal is to maintain patients' quality of life and keep them safe. In addition to looking at the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we analyzed the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility vaccinated 83.793106 percent of its patients. This is a bit lower than we anticipated but still a reasonably acceptable figure. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.