The Center at Centennial

The Center at Centennial is an average-sized nursing home located in Colorado Springs, Colorado. It looks like this nursing home is one of the highest-graded nursing homes we looked at. In fact, it was given our most impressive rating. In fact, we ranked this facility as the third best facility in Colorado Springs. This nursing home was also given strong grades in each of the major categories we assessed. More information about these categories can be found below.

In addition to being a great overall grade, this facility also received A+ health inspections in recent years. Its inspections were virtually flawless. Arguably the most important factor we look at in computing our inspection ratings is deficiencies. These deficiencies can be found on a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places with better scores in this area typically dodged the more severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. 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.

We also awarded this facility a grade of A+ for its short-term care grade. In determining our short-term care ratings, we assess a nursing home's levels of highly skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists respiratory therapists and other highly skilled individuals. This area is generally a useful measure of the facility's ability to rehabilitate patients. This nursing home is the gold standard in terms of skilled nursing staffing. The facility offered about 50% more registered nurse and physical therapist hours per resident than the average facility. Lastly, we looked at the percentage of residents who returned home from this facility. On top of excelling in the area of physical therapy staffing, we found that it performed as well as just about any facility with 64.3 percent of its residents returning home. Most nursing homes are below 50 percent in this metric.

We also want to point out the fact that this nursing home received a strong grade of A in our long-term care area. In a long-term care environment, the primary goal is to keep patients as healthy and safe as possible. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate patients. One of the factors we considered in addition to nurse's aid hours was vaccinations. It doesn't look like this nursing home provided information about vaccinations. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

Moving on to the last category, this nursing home also excelled in the nursing category. We awarded it an A for this category. This rounded out a straight A profile. Our nursing score is largely based on a nursing home's nurse staffing. This facility provided 5.7 hours of nursing care per resident each day. This was one of the more impressive figures we found. Furthermore, a significant percentage of this care was provided by registered nurses, which are highly skilled nurses. In addition to offering impressive levels of nursing care, this facility also excelled in the quality-based metrics we looked at. It performed as well as any nursing home in the nation in terms of minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls.