Colorado Springs Senior AdvisorWhere can I look up a Colorado Springs assisted living residence's inspections?
In CDPHE's Find and Compare Facilities tool, which lists each licensed facility's inspections, the citations from each, and occurrence reports for roughly the last three years; our facility pages reproduce that record for every ALR and nursing home in El Paso and Teller counties.
Search by name or by CDPHE facility ID, which we show on each page. The tool does not publish fines, license expiration dates or which ALRs have a secure environment, so those are questions for the residence itself. For nursing homes, CMS Care Compare adds federal star ratings, staffing hours and penalties.
What is an occurrence report in Colorado?
An occurrence report is a facility's own notice to CDPHE that a reportable event happened, such as a missing resident, an injury of unknown origin, an allegation of abuse or neglect, or diverted drugs; it is a report, not a finding that the facility did something wrong.
Colorado requires licensed facilities to report these events so the state can decide whether to investigate. A building that reports diligently can look worse on paper than one that does not. Among the 69 senior ALRs in our two counties, the median is 5 reports over the window CDPHE shows, and the most common types in the recent entries are physical abuse, misappropriation of property, missing person. Look at the types more than the count: several missing-person reports from a memory care building say something different from a scattering of falls in a large campus.
How should we read citations on a CDPHE inspection?
A citation means surveyors found a rule not met during that visit; read the number in context of the building's size and the type of visit, and look for repeated themes such as medication errors or care plans across several years.
Complaint investigations and revisits appear alongside routine licensing surveys. A revisit with few or no citations usually means the problems from the earlier visit were corrected. Ask the administrator for the full statement of deficiencies and the plan of correction for the most recent visit; Colorado ALRs must tell you where the latest inspection report can be read.
What do CMS star ratings mean for Colorado Springs nursing homes?
CMS rates every Medicare- and Medicaid-certified nursing home from one to five stars overall and separately for health inspections, staffing and quality measures; they are federal ratings, refreshed monthly, and we reproduce them exactly as CMS publishes them.
CDPHE licenses 21 nursing facilities in El Paso and Teller counties with 1,929 beds, and CMS rates 21 of them, 8 at four or five stars overall (Care Compare data as of October 1, 2026). The health inspection rating carries the most weight in the overall score and compares a home with others in the same state. Stars do not cover assisted living; Colorado ALRs have no star rating from anyone official, and we do not invent one.
Side by side
| A public record can tell you | A public record cannot tell you | |
|---|---|---|
| Inspections | When CDPHE visited and how many citations it wrote | Whether today's staff are the same people |
| Occurrences | Which reportable events the facility notified the state about | Whether each event was the facility's fault |
| Stars | How CMS rates a certified nursing home | How an assisted living residence would rate |
| Memory care | Nothing: CDPHE does not flag secure environments | Whether a unit is locked; ask for the Part 25 disclosure |
Drawn from 6 CCR 1011-1 Chapter 7, CDPHE and HCPF publications, CareScout, CMS, the VA and the Pikes Peak Area Agency on Aging; our editorial standards explain how we check them.
