Rocky Mountain Care - Willow Springs

In addition to receiving a strong overall grade, this nursing home performed well in our short-term care category. In fact, we awarded it a grade of A for that category. Our short-term care grade is commonly used to score a nursing home's performance with rehabilitation. To offer quality rehabilitation services, facilities generally need to feature higher levels of highly skilled nursing services. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other highly skilled individuals. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not every facility employs these skilled professionals. However, according to the information this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The final item we looked at in this area is the percentage of patients that were able to return home from the facility. We found that 6 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home as opposed to remaining at the nursing home on a permanent basis.

We also awarded this nursing home a grade of A- for our nursing grade. Our nursing score is mostly associated with a facility's nurse staffing. This particular nursing home provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality measures and this facility excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any facility the state in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can typically be prevented by providing better nursing care, such as having a system of turning patients even once per day.

Another area of strength for this nursing home is in inspections. In fact, inspections turned out to be one of its best categories. In that area, we awarded this nursing home a B. Perhaps the most significant factor we consider in determining our inspection grades is deficiencies. Deficiencies can be found on a facility's inspection reports. Nursing homes with better grades in this category typically avoided the more severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. While this nursing home had some minor dings on its government inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and 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 safety or health. The fact that the deficiencies were relatively minor leaves us less concerned with this inspection report.

The final category we graded was long-term care, ended up being this nursing home's least impressive category. We awarded this nursing home a D in this area. This is one of just a couple of weak links in an otherwise impressive profile. For residents looking for a permanent place to live as opposed to skilled nursing, long-term care grades are a key measure. Once we assessed the amount of nursing care, we next considered the facility's vaccination data. We were optimistic to learn that this nursing home vaccinates 97.80219 percent of its residents against pneumonia. Surprisingly, this nursing home also fared well at keeping its residents out of the hospital. It had only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. Unfortunately, a few of its other scores in this category weren't as favorable as these.