Rocky Mountain Care - The Lodge

In addition to being a quality nursing home overall, this facility really excelled in the area of short-term care, where it received an impressive grade of A. Few nursing homes performed better in this area. Short-term care scores are based on a nursing home's quantity of skilled highly skilled professionals. This means a wide range of nursing services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, in addition to other variations of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not every facility employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, based on the information this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The last statistic we looked at in this category is the number of patients who who were able to eventually return home from the facility. We found that 6.3 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home as opposed to remaining at the nursing home on a permanent basis.

One of the other reasons we graded this facility so highly is that it received a very impressive nursing score. In that category, we awarded this nursing home an A-. Nursing grades are mostly tied to a facility's level of nurse staffing. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality measures and this place 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 Utah in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can many times be avoided by offering better nursing care, such as having a policy of moving a patient more often.

In addition, this facility also excelled in the area of inspections, where it earned a grade of B+. Few nursing homes performed better in this area. Our inspection scores account for several factors included in a facility's inspection reports. One of the most important criteria we look at is the number and severity of deficiencies. Nursing homes with better scores in this category usually have very few severe deficiencies. While this place had a few minor dings on its inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those found in categories G through L. This means that the government inspectors did not consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. Keep in mind that deficiency-free inspection reports are uncommon in the industry.

The last category we scored was long-term care, where this facility was awarded a grade of B-. Even though this is its poorest category grade, this is still not a poor grade. Long-term care grades are pivotal for prospective residents needing non-healthcare services such as personal care. Once we concluded our assessment of the quantity of care provided by nurses, we then looked at the facility's vaccination statistics. We were pleased to learn that this nursing home vaccinated 95.726494 percent of its patients for pneumonia. Lastly, this nursing home was also able to limit hospitalizations. It had only 0.02 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.