Wheatridge Manor Care Center

One of the reasons this turned out to be a great facility is that it earned a strong short-term care grade. In fact, this proved to be its best category. In that area, we awarded this nursing home an A. Short-term care grades are generally employed to grade a facility's rehabilitation services. In order to have quality rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally need to feature higher levels of skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other highly trained professionals. Fortunately, it looks like this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not all nursing homes employs these skilled professionals. However, according to the information this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Lastly, we looked at the percentage of residents who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 6.5 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.

Adding to its impressive resume, this nursing home also excelled in our nursing category. In fact, we awarded it a grade of A for that category. Our nursing score is primarily tied to a nursing home's nurse staffing. This nursing home provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This facility performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a nursing home has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can often be avoided if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

This facility has received near flawless health inspections in recent years. We awarded them an impressive grade of A- in this category. Our inspection grades are tied to several items found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Facilities that receive favorable grades in this area tend to have few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these nursing homes generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. 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. Even some of the best nursing homes receive an occasional ding on their inspection report.

The final area we assessed is long-term care. We awarded this facility one of our higher scores in this category, with a B. While this isn't as dominant as several of this nursing home's other scores, it is still an excellent score. Facilities that receive this kind of score in this category typically provide consistent around the clock care to ensure patients are kept in good health. In addition to assessing the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home gave the vaccine to 100 percent of its patients. Vaccines are critical to keeping residents out of the hospital. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. It had only 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.