Mesa Vista of Boulder

We awarded this nursing home one of our better scores in nursing, with an A-. This is a notably better grade than the facility's overall score, which was decent but not in the elite range. Our nursing grade weighs many datapoints. The most important variable is the quantity of hours nurses spend with residents. This nursing home provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed 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 country in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can often be avoided by providing better nursing care, such as having a system of moving a resident at least once a day.

We also wanted to emphasize this facility's nearly flawless health inspections in recent years. We awarded them an impressive grade of B+ in this category. Arguably the most critical factor we consider in determining our inspection ratings is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a facility's inspection reports. Facilities with higher scores in this area most likely dodged the most severe deficiencies involving health risks or even death. 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. Even some of the best nursing homes receive an occasional ding on their inspection report.

This facilities next best area was short-term care. We gave it a C in this category. This is essentially a middle of the road score in this category. In calculating our short-term care scores, we analyze the facility's levels of highly skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists occupational therapists and other licensed professionals. This category is often a reliable measure of the nursing home's ability to rehabilitate patients. Unfortunately, we were not able to locate information about this nursing home's registered nurse or physical therapy staffing. The last datapoint we assessed in this category is the percentage of residents who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. We discovered that just 0 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home, which is below average.

Switching gears to the fourth area, this nursing home was awarded a grade of C in long-term care, which we consider to be a respectable score. Our long-term care ratings are more important for those in need of more conventional services associated with personal care. In addition to assessing the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. Candidly, we were a bit alarmed this nursing home administered the vaccine to just 52.45902 percent of its residents. On a more positive note, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.