Rocky Mountain Care - Riverton

To pair with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A+ for its nursing grade. With our short-term care grade, we seek to create a fair gauge for rehabilitation. In doing so, we look at a facility's level of skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as respiratory therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not every facility employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, according to the data they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The final datapoint we looked at in this area is the number of residents who were able to leave the nursing home and return home. We discovered that 7.1 percent of this nursing home's residents were able to return home.

This first-rate facility also excelled in the area of nursing, where it received a grade of A+. Few nursing homes performed better in this area. Our nursing score consists of many datapoints, many of which are associated with nursing hours. This nursing home averages 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This nursing home 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.

This facility also was awarded a very impressive long-term care score. Indeed, this ended up being this nursing home's third most impressive category score. In that category, we awarded this facility a grade of A. Facilities that excel in long-term care typically are well-staffed and offer extensive hands on care to patients. On top of assessing the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility provided the vaccine to 100 percent of its residents, which is very impressive. Pneumonia is often a life threatening condition for nursing home residents so we prefer when a facility does not roll the dice on this issue. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

Adding to its impressive category grades, this facility also excelled in inspections, where it received an impressive grade of A. This wrapped up a straight A report card for this facility. Inspection scores are based on several pieces of information located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Facilities that excel in this category have few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these facilities should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. Although this facility had some deficiencies on its report, none of them were serious based on CMS' scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.