Laramie Care Center

Although we gave this facility a terrible overall grade, we awarded it a B- for our inspections rating. In fact, the facility received very impressive inspection report this year. Our inspection ratings are based on pieces of information found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Deficiencies are an important thing to look for on these inspections. Severe deficiencies indicate a risk to the well being of residents. Fortunately, although this place had a few minor dings on its government inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means the inspectors didn't consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. Finally, CMS cited this nursing home for possible abuse or neglect. Hopefully, its performance improves in the future, but until then we simply can't recommend this facility.

We were also pleasantly surprised to learn that this nursing home earned a reasonably solid short-term care grade in our assessment. We awarded it a grade of B- in this category. In determining our short-term care scores, we analyze the facility's levels of highly skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists respiratory therapists and other highly skilled individuals. This grade is frequently a useful assessment of a facility's rehabilitation. Unfortunately, this facility was below average in terms of its level of physical therapy and registered nurse hours provided to its residents based on the measures we assessed. The question is whether this also impacted quality of care. The final metric we looked at in this category is the number of residents who were able to leave the nursing home and return home. We discovered that just 4.5 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home, which is below average.

This facility's next best category was nursing, but even there it received a grade of just D. This is still a well below average grade. Our nursing score is largely tied to the nursing home's nurse staffing. This nursing home provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a much lower figure than we are used to seeing. Finally, we also assessed some nursing quality measures in determining our nursing ratings. This nursing home performed well when it comes to minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers.

The last category we scored was long-term care, was this facility's worst category. We awarded this nursing home a grade of D in this category. Facilities that do not fare well in long-term care typically aren't as well-staffed and are lagging in some of the areas of routine personal care we looked at. After assessing the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we then analyzed the facility's vaccination records. Candidly, we were a bit alarmed this nursing home vaccinated 86.27451 percent of its patients for pneumonia, which is quite a few points less than average. Surprisingly, this place was actually able to limit hospitalizations. With just 0.02 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, this facility had less hospitalizations than many nursing homes. This was its best feature in this category.