Rocky Mountain Care - Clearfield

On top of earning a strong overall grade, this nursing home also earned an elite short-term care grade. We gave them one of our higher scores in that area, with an A-. Short-term care ratings are based in part on the facility's quantity of skilled highly skilled professionals. This includes a vast scope of services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and respiratory therapists, not to mention other types of therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not all facilities employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, according to the data they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The final datapoint we considered in this category is the number of patients that returned home from the facility. We found that 5.1 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home as opposed to remaining at the facility on a permanent basis.

One of the other reasons we rated this facility so highly is that it received a very impressive nursing grade. In fact, nursing turned out to be its second best category grade. In that area, we awarded this facility a grade of A-. Nursing scores are primarily based on a facility's nurse staffing. This nursing home averages 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 place the country in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can often be prevented by offering better nursing care, such as having a policy of moving patients even once per day.

Adding another impressive category grade, we gave this nursing home a grade of B+ for our inspections rating. Our inspection grades are based on several datapoints found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes that score well in this area typically have few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these facilities generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. Fortunately, although this nursing home had some minor dings on its government inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones found in categories G through L. This tells you that the government inspectors didn't consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. Remember that deficiency-free inspections are rare in the industry.

The final category we analyzed was long-term care, in which this nursing home was given a grade of B. This facility ended up being strong across the board. When facilities receive this kind of grade in this category it is a good sign for resident care and indicates that the place is well-staffed with nurses aids. In addition to assessing the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we analyzed the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility vaccinated 96.82539 percent of its patients. Vaccines are critical to keeping patients healthy. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.