The Suites at Holly Creek Care Center

Located in Littleton, Colorado, The Suites at Holly Creek Care Center is one of eight 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 Littleton, 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!

One of the many reasons this place received a great overall grade is that it received an A+ short-term care grade. This is as good as it gets in this category. In our short-term care grade, we try to create a fair measure for rehabilitation. In doing so, we analyze a nursing home's offerings of skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as speech therapy. This nursing home is substantially above the national average in terms of its quantity of both physical therapy and registered nurse hours provided to its residents. In fact, it provided about 50% more care per resident from both of these care providers than the average facility provided. These are generally good indicators of quality short-term care. Lastly, we looked at the number of patients who returned home from this nursing home. In addition to excelling in the area of physical therapy, we found that it performed as well as just about any facility in the nation with 73.1 percent of its patients returning home. Most nursing homes are below 50 percent in this metric.

In addition, this facility received high marks in the area of nursing. As a result, it received one of our highest grades in that category with a score of A+. Nursing ratings are primarily based on a facility's level of nurse staffing. This place provides an incredible 5.7 hours of nursing care per patient on a daily basis. Out of that total, many of the hours were provided by registered nurses, which is one of the most highly trained levels of nurses. On top of offering impressive levels of nursing care, this facility also excelled in several of the quality measures we assessed. With under 5 percent of its patients suffering from pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any facility the nation in this category. This is generally a good indicator that a place has reliable quality controls. Many pressure ulcers can be avoided by offering better nursing care and a system of moving residents at least once a day.

This nursing home also was given an A+ for its long-term care grade. Long-term care grades of this caliber generally require both around the clock care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine medical care. In addition to considering the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home administered the vaccine to 91.42857 percent of its residents. This is a bit below what we expected but still a respectable percentage. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

Wrapping up this facility's impressive resume, we awarded this nursing home a score of A for our inspections rating. With this grade, the facility completes its straight A report card. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in calculating these inspection ratings. One of those factors is deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of the deficiencies is usually more important than the number of deficiencies, as some end up being quite insignificant. This particular nursing home had just a single deficiency on its inspection report and it was not one deemed to pose a threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.