The Estates at Greeley

In addition to faring well overall, this facility also received nearly flawless government inspections. Consequently, it received one of our highest scores in that area with an A+. Arguably the most critical factor we consider in calculating our inspection scores is deficiencies. Deficiencies can be found on a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Facilities with better scores in this area typically avoided the more severe deficiencies involving health risks or even death. While this place had a few minor dings on its government inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are labeled as categories G through L. This tells you that the inspectors didn't deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. Remember that deficiency-free inspection reports are rare in the industry.

Among its many impressive grades, this facility received an excellent nursing grade. In fact, we gave it a grade of A in that category. Our nursing score is largely associated with a nursing home's level of nurse staffing. This nursing home provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also assessed some nursing quality-based metrics in determining our nursing grades. This place performed very well when it comes to minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

The third area we looked at is short-term care. Contributing to its top-shelf resume, this facility also excelled in this category. In fact, we gave it a of A for that category. Our short-term care grade is generally employed to gauge a facility's rehabilitation services In order to provide high-end rehabilitation services, facilities generally need to offer better levels of skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists and other licensed professionals. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not every nursing home employs these types of nurses. However, according to the information this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Finally, we looked at the percentage of residents who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 5.8 percent of this facility's patients returned home.

In the last area, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A+ for its long-term care score. This rounded out a very favorable report card. Facilities that receive this kind of score in long-term care tend to provide consistent 24/7 care to make sure patients are well cared for. Once we finished looking at the amount of care provided by nurses, we next considered the nursing home's vaccination record. This facility vaccinated 100 percent of its patients against pneumonia, which is what we like to see. Pneumonia is often a life threatening condition for nursing home residents so we strongly prefer when a nursing home doesn't leave this to chance. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.