Southeast Colorado Hospital Long Term Care Center

On top of being a first rate nursing home overall, this nursing home also fared well in long-term care, where it earned an impressive grade of A+. Few facilities fared better in this area. Facilities that do well in long-term care typically are well-staffed and provide extensive hands on care to patients. In addition to looking at the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home gave the vaccine to 100 percent of its residents. Vaccines are vital to keeping patients out of the hospital. Finally, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

We also wanted to emphasize the fact that this facility excelled in our nursing rating. We awarded them an impressive grade of A+ in this category. Nursing scores are primarily tied to the nursing home's nurse staffing. This nursing home provides 0.6 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality-based metrics 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 prevented by providing better nursing care, such as employing a system of turning a patient more frequently.

The next category we looked at was inspections, where this facility also received an A+ grade. This is simply as good as it gets in this critical category. Arguably the most significant factor we look at in computing our inspection grades is deficiencies. These deficiencies can be found on a facility's inspection reports. Nursing homes with higher scores in this category typically dodged the most severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. 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.

Turning to our fourth category, this nursing home also excelled in the short-term care category. We gave it a grade of A- for that area. This wrapped up truly elite profile. Short-term care ratings are vital for prospective residents looking for rehabilitation. Rehabilitation generally utilizes more skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing means a broad spectrum of nursing services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, as well as other variations of therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not every facility employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, according to the information this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Lastly, we looked at the percentage of residents who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 0 percent of this facility's residents returned home.