Rocky Mountain Care - Evanston

With an address in Evanston, Wyoming, Rocky Mountain Care - Evanston is the sole nursing home we were able to find in the city. This turns out to be a grade A facility, which is a high-end grade. In fact, we ranked this nursing home in the top 20 percent of all nursing homes in the country. If you scroll down, you can see this place's category grades, which are just as strong as its overall rating.

We also wanted to emphasize that this nursing home has earned nearly flawless government inspections in recent years. We gave them an A in this category. These inspection grades take several factors into consideration, including deficiencies, substantiated complaints and federal fines. You can learn more about each of these factors by reviewing copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. This nursing home was hit with 3 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none of the deficiencies were considered to be major deficiencies. This tells you that CMS didn't consider any of these deficiencies to cause an immediate risk to patient safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

One of the other reasons we rated this facility so highly is that it received a very impressive nursing rating. In fact, nursing turned out to be its second best category grade. In that category, we gave this nursing home an A. Our nursing rating analyzes several subcategories, however, the main consideration is the quantity of nurse hours spent with patients. This nursing home provides 3.7 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This facility performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a nursing home has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can typically be avoided if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

Turning our third category, we awarded this facility a grade of A- for its short-term care score. This is a very strong score. In calculating our short-term care ratings, we analyze the facility's levels of skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists speech therapists and other licensed professionals. This rating is more often than not a fair assessment of a facility's ability to rehabilitate patients. One of this nursing home's strengths is registered nurse hours. We found that it offers more care from registered nurses to its residents than most facilities. Finally, we looked at the number of residents who were able to return home from this nursing home. This place outperformed the vast majority of nursing homes in the nation in this area with 58.9 percent of its patients returning home.

The fourth category we graded is long-term care, where this facility was awarded an A-. This wrapped up an elite report card. Not many nursing homes received an A- or better in every single category. If you are seeking services other than short-term rehabilitation, you should take a close look at each facility's long-term care scores. On top of assessing the volume of care provided by nurses and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home gave the vaccine to 81.21212 percent of its residents. This is slightly below what we anticipated. While its vaccination rate was a bit lower than we hoped for, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.