Life Care Center of Casper

With an overall grade this high, it should come as no surprise that this facility performed well in inspections, where it received an A. Arguably the most critical factor we look at in determining our inspection grades is deficiencies. Deficiencies are found on a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Facilities with better scores in this category typically avoided the more severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. While this nursing home had a few minor dings on its inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones found in categories G through L. This means the government inspectors didn't consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. We should note that deficiency-free inspection reports are rare in this industry.

To complement its strong performance in other areas, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A for our inspections rating. We weighed the levels of nurses working for the nursing home, as well as the number of hours those nurses worked with patients, in computing our grade in this category. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality-based metrics and this nursing home excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any nursing home the nation in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can many times be avoided by providing better nursing care, such as by having a policy of moving a patient more frequently.

We also wanted to draw your attention to the fact that this nursing home was given a strong grade of A in our short-term care area. Short-term care grades are crucial for individuals seeking rehabilitation. Rehabilitation typically utilizes more highly-skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing means a broad spectrum of nursing services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, as well as other forms of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this facility employs registered nurses. Not every facility employs these types of nurses. However, according to the data this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The final measure we considered in this category is the number of patients who were able to leave the nursing home and return home. We found that 5.2 percent of this facility's patients returned home.

In the last category, this nursing home also received an impressive long-term care score, with a grade of A-. This wrapped up a very strong report card. Facilities that excel in this category typically provide residents with better supervision and stay on top of routine healthcare services. After considering the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we next considered the nursing home's vaccination records. This nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its patients against pneumonia, which is significantly higher than the vast majority of nursing homes. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.