Cheyenne Reg Medical Center Transitional Care Unit

One of the many reasons this ended up being a great nursing home is that it earned an A+ inspection grade. This is just about as good as it gets in this very important category. Inspection grades account for several factors included in a facility's inspection report. One key criteria we look at is the quantity and severity of deficiencies. Places with better grades in this area usually have very few of these severe deficiencies. 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.

This facility also was given an A+ for its short-term care score. With our short-term care assessment, we endeavor to forge a meaningful gauge for rehabilitation. In doing so, we assess a nursing home's level of highly-skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as occupational therapy. This nursing home employs both physical therapists and registered nurses. Not all facilities employ these skilled professionals. Finally, we looked at the percentage of residents that ultimately were able to return home from this nursing home. We found that 7.4 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.

This nursing home also was strong in the area of long-term care, where we awarded it a grade of A. Very few nursing homes received a better grade in this area. In a long-term care environment, the nursing home's primary goal is to keep patients healthy and safe. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate residents. Once we looked at the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we turned to the nursing home's vaccination statistics. Unfortunately, it does not appear that this facility provided data regarding vaccinations. Clearly, this nursing home 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 one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

Moving on to our fourth category, this facility was given a highly favorable nursing grade. In fact, we awarded it a grade of A in that category, resulting in this facility receiving straight A's. Our nursing rating analyzes the nursing home's nurse staffing levels. We consider both the levels of skill of those nurses and the number of hours spent with patients. This particular nursing home provided 1.1 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also assessed certain nursing quality-based metrics in computing our nursing grades. These include minimizing residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We view these data points as predictive indicators of the quality of nursing care offered, since better care tends to reduce these problems.