Life Care Center of Cheyenne

Life Care Center of Cheyenne is a large nursing home located in Cheyenne, Wyoming. With an overall rating of A-, this facility is among the better nursing homes we assessed. We ranked this facility in the top 25 facilities in Wyoming. This facility also received consistently good grades in each of our categories. Additional information about its category grades can be found below.

In addition to receiving a quality overall score, this nursing home also received excellent health inspections recently. We gave it one of our highest scores in that area, with a grade of A. Arguably the most critical factor we look at in computing our inspection ratings is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places with better grades in this category most likely avoided the most severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. Fortunately, although this place had some minor dings on its inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means the inspectors did not deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. The fact that none of the deficiencies were severe made us feel better about this inspection report.

Contributing to its top-shelf assessment, this nursing home also was awarded a strong short-term care grade, with a score of A. Our short-term care grades are arguably more critical for patients in need of rehabilitation from their nursing home. Rehabilitation generally mandates higher levels of skilled nursing services. This means not only nursing services, but also physical and speech therapy, as well as other types of therapy. Remarkably, this nursing home provides approximately one and a half times as many hours of services from physical therapists and registered nurses than most nursing homes we looked at. This is generally a very favorable sign. Lastly, we looked at the number of residents who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that it outperformed the vast majority of nursing homes in the country in this area with 61 percent of its residents returning home. This is a significantly higher rate than most facilities.

In addition, this facility also received favorable nursing grades this year. In fact, we awarded them one of our better scores in that area, with a grade of B+. The nursing score is based on several subcategories, but the most important consideration is the quantity of nurse hours spent with patients. This place offers 3.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day, of which more than an hour was provided by registered nurses. This is one of the most highly trained levels of nurses. In determining our nursing scores, we add more weight to hours provided by registered nurses. Lastly, we also looked at some quality-based measures in this category. This facility fared well in some of the quality-based metrics we assessed. By way of illustration, in terms of the percentage of its patients suffering from pressure ulcers, this facility performed better than the national average. This is generally an indicator that a place has reliable quality controls in place. Pressure ulcers can often be prevented with better nursing care.

The last category we looked at is long-term care. We gave this facility one of our higher scores in this area, with a B. Although this is not as dominant as many of this nursing home's other scores, it is still a fine score. Nursing homes that excel in long-term care tend to be well-staffed and provide extensive hands on care to patients. In addition to looking at the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility administered the vaccine to 99.431816 percent of its patients, which is what we like to see. Pneumonia is too frequently a life or death ailment for nursing home residents so we like it when a nursing home doesn't roll the dice on this issue. This nursing home also keeps its patients out of the hospital. It had only 1.1 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a significantly lower hospitalization rate than the majority of nursing homes.