Miners Colfax Medical Center

To pair with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A+ for its nursing grade. When facilities receive a grade in this range in long-term care it generally means it's well-staffed and is an overall good place to live on a permanent basis. After looking at the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we next considered the facility's vaccination statistics. This facility vaccinated 100 percent of its patients for pneumonia. Vaccines are critical to keeping residents out of the hospital. Finally, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

One of the other reasons we rated this facility so highly is that it earned a very impressive nursing score. This turned out to be its second best category grade. In that category, we awarded this facility an A. Nursing grades are based in large part on quality and quantity of nursing care. This facility provided 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality-based metrics and this place 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 frequently be avoided by offering better nursing care, such as employing a protocol of moving a patient even once per day.

This nursing home has received near flawless inspections in recent years. We gave them an impressive grade of A in this category. Arguably the most important factor we consider in computing our inspection scores is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a nursing home's inspection reports. Facilities with better grades in this area most likely avoided the most severe deficiencies involving health risks or even death. This nursing home was assessed 2 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none were considered to be severe. This indicates that the inspectors didn't consider any of these deficiencies to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

In the last area, we awarded this facility a grade of A for its short-term care score. This wrapped up an elite report card. Our short-term care scores are vital for people in need of rehabilitation. Rehabilitation usually utilizes more highly-skilled nursing. This means a wide range of nursing services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, as well as other variations of therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this facility employs registered nurses. Not all facilities employs these skilled professionals. However, according to the data they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Finally, we looked at the number of residents who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 0 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.