Skyline Ridge Nursing and Rehabilitation Center

Located in Canon City, Colorado, Skyline Ridge Nursing and Rehabilitation Center is one of four nursing homes in this area. Sporting an overall grade of A+, this facility is clearly a top-shelf facility. Indeed, we were so impressed with this nursing home that we rated it ahead of most of the facilities in Canon City, which has a strong selection of facilities. As you will find below, this nursing home performed equally well in our category ratings. In fact, we gave it straight A's!

In addition to receiving a great overall grade, this facility also received an A+ long-term care grade. Nursing homes that receive this kind of grade in long-term care typically provide consistent around the clock care to ensure residents are well cared for. One of the factors we considered on top of nursing hours is vaccines. This nursing home administered the pneumonia vaccination to 100 percent of its residents. This is a reliable method to minimize unnecessary hospitalizations for the nursing home population. This facility was also able to keep its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had just 1.02 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a substantially lower hospitalization rate than most nursing homes.

This nursing home also earned an A+ inspection score, making it one of the rare places to receive multiple A+'s in our category grades. This grade is based on the facility's inspection reports. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in determining these inspection ratings. One critical factor is deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of deficiencies is usually more important than the number of deficiencies, as some deficiencies can be quite insignificant. While this nursing home had some minor dings on its government inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means that the inspectors did not consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report 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.

Adding to its strong resume, this facility also received an excellent nursing score, with a grade of A. The nursing grade is based on quite a few datapoints, many of which are based on levels of nurse staffing. This particular nursing home provided 3.7 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed certain nursing quality-based metrics in computing our nursing grades. These include minimizing residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We view these metrics as good indicators of the caliber of nursing care being provided, since better care tends to reduce these problems.

Moving on to our final category, this facility was awarded a very strong short-term care grade. In fact, we awarded it a grade of A- in that area, giving this facility straight A's. Short-term care grades are commonly employed to judge a nursing home's rehabilitation services. To provide highly graded rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally must feature better levels of skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other highly skilled individuals. One reason for this facility's strong score in this category is that it provides more care with registered nurses to its residents than the average nursing home. Finally, we looked at the number of patients who ultimately were able to return home from this facility. It performed better than most nursing homes with 52.3 percent of its patients returning home.