Wyoming

The grounds, as Wyoming describes them

Not stated in the sources reviewed. Chapter 11, Program Administration of Nursing Care Facilities, and Chapter 19, Licensure of Nursing Care Facilities (both Wyoming Department of Health), and the Health Facilities Act, W.S. 35-2-901 through 35-2-914 (Wyoming Legislature), enumerate no permissible bases on which a facility may involuntarily discharge, transfer, or otherwise move a resident, and state no notice period or resident-side appeal attached to such a decision.

Where Chapter 11 uses discharge and transfer, it is for other purposes. Section 10 ("Discharge Planning") requires "a centralized, coordinated program to ensure that each resident has a planned program of continuing care which meets the post discharge needs" — a care-transition planning duty, not a ground or a notice for an involuntary move. Section 18 ("Transfer Agreement") requires each facility to hold a written hospital-transfer agreement that "shall provide reasonable assurance that the transfer of residents will be effected between the hospital and the facility whenever such transfer is medically appropriate as determined by the attending physician" and that "shall specify the responsibilities each facility assumes in the transfer of residents" — an inter-facility logistics agreement, not a resident's own grounds or notice. The federal enumerated grounds for Medicare/Medicaid-certified facilities are assembled separately on the federal page; nothing here borrows from that page as if Wyoming stated it.

The published process

Requesting the hearing

No hearing in the sources reviewed is available to a resident contesting a facility's own decision to discharge, transfer, or relocate them. Chapter 11's own hearing, Section 22(b), belongs to the facility: "Any Nursing Care Facility aggrieved by a decision of the Program Division may request a hearing by submitting a written request to the Program Division within ten (10) days of the date of the adverse action at 6101 Yellowstone Road, North Building, Room 259B, Cheyenne, WY 82002."

The only resident-side hearing the sources publish runs through Medicaid, and only for a different decision: whether the resident meets nursing facility level of care. Medicaid Chapter 22, Section 6(e): "In accordance with Chapter 4, the Department shall provide notice of adverse action and the right to request an administrative hearing to any individual whose Medicaid service coverage or eligibility is denied, reduced, terminated, or suspended as a result of its reconsideration determination." Chapter 4, Section 7(a): "A client’s request for a hearing shall be submitted electronically via email to the" "Department, made verbally to the Department, mailed to the Department via certified mail, return receipt requested, or personally delivered to the Department within twenty (20) business days after the mailing of the notice of adverse action." Chapter 4 names no email address, street address or form for that request.

The pendency analogue, Chapter 4 Section 9(a): "If the Department mails the required notice and the client requests a hearing before the effective date of the action, the Department may not terminate or reduce services until the final decision is rendered after the hearing unless: (i) The Hearing Officer determines at the hearing that the sole issue is one of federal or state law or policy; and (ii) The Department promptly informs the client in writing that services are to be terminated or reduced pending the final decision." Section 8(a): "The Department shall evaluate the request and, within ten (10) business days following the receipt of the request notify the requesting party in writing whether the request has been accepted or rejected." Section 11: "A hearing shall be held within forty (40) days of the request for hearing unless otherwise provided by law, by agreement of the parties, or if a contestant requests a continuance." Section 13(a): "The hearing officer shall make proposed findings of fact and conclusions of law within twenty (20) business days of the close of the hearing and forward them to the Director for t h e final decision." (the spacing inside "the" is the rule's own typesetting, preserved as published). Section 13(b): "Within ten (10) business days after the period for submitting exceptions, the Director shall make and enter into the record the final decision."

The notice's required contents

Chapter 4, Section 5(a), states what the Department's own adverse-action notice to an applicant or client must include: "An explanation of: (A) The individual’s right to request a hearing; or (B) An explanation of circumstances where a hearing will be granted" "based on a change in the law"; "(ii) The method for requesting a hearing;" "(iii) The individual's right to be represented by a legally authorized representative, including a lawyer admitted to practice in Wyoming, a relative, friend or other spokesperson;" "(v) The intended action;" "(vi) The effective date of the intended action;" "(vii) The reason(s) for the intended action;" "(viii) The specific regulations that support, or the change in federal or state law that requires the action;" and, where applicable, "an explanation of the circumstances under which benefits may be continued if a hearing is requested pursuant to 42 C.F.R. § 431.231." This is the Department's own notice of a level-of-care or eligibility adverse action, not a facility's notice of an involuntary discharge or transfer, which these sources do not separately require.

Chapter 11, Section 19(a)(iii), states what a facility must keep posted for every resident, which the docket already quotes: "Have available in a conspicuous place telephone numbers and addresses of" "the Long-Term Care Ombudsman, Protection and Advocacy, the local Department of Family Services Adult Protection office, the Medicaid Fraud Control Unit, the Wyoming State Survey Agency, and the facility’s grievance/complaint representative." Section 21(a): "Residents’ unresolved grievances and/or complaints shall be referred to the Long-Term Care Ombudsman."

Bed-hold and return

The Institutional Provider Manual, Section 18.5.1 ("Reserve Bed Days"), states Wyoming Medicaid's own coverage rule: "Reserve bed days during a resident's temporary absence are not covered unless the resident is absent from the facility for less than 24 hours. In these instances, the absence is to be billed to Medicaid as a normal covered day. For days the resident is absent from the facility for 24 hours or more, bill these as non-covered days, using value code 81." It further states: "A Provider may bill a Member or the Member's responsible party for reserved bed days if the facility has informed them in writing of their financial responsibility before services are rendered." This is a Medicaid billing rule — what the program will and will not pay for — not a resident's right to have a bed held or to return to it; the sources reviewed state no such right.

No first-party statement of a resident's right to return to or resume residence in the facility after a temporary absence was found among the sources reviewed for this page — Chapter 11, Chapter 19, the Health Facilities Act, Medicaid Chapters 22 and 4, and this Institutional Provider Manual chapter. That absence is recorded here, not assumed to mean the same as Medicaid's own 24-hour coverage line.

The three rows above hoist the questions a facility's counsel answers in the first fifteen minutes and a resident's family almost never finds alone. They are quotations from Wyoming's published sources, not a determination that any of them applies to any situation. On these sources, the first hoisted row has no facility-level answer for a resident: the only resident-side hearing that exists addresses a different decision, the Medicaid level-of-care determination, not a facility's own choice to discharge, transfer, or relocate.

Notice periods and deadlines, as stated in the sources

All quoted; none calculated.

Ten business days' notice of a Medicaid adverse action to a client, five in stated exceptions — Chapter 4, Section 6(b): "The Department shall mail notice of adverse action at least ten (10) business days before the effective date, except:" "The Department may mail notice, not less than five (5) business days before the effective date if, the circumstance indicate probable fraud by a client, and if possible, there are facts that have been verified through secondary sources." Further exceptions at (ii)(A)–(G) allow notice to be mailed not later than the effective date.

Twenty business days to request reconsideration of a level-of-care determination — Medicaid Chapter 22, Section 6(b): reconsideration requests must be "submitted in writing within twenty (20) business days of the notice of adverse action" and in accordance with the Department's established procedures.

Twenty business days to request a Medicaid administrative hearing — Chapter 4, Section 7(a), quoted in full above; Section 7(b) states the same twenty-business-day period for a provider's request.

Ten business days for the Department to accept or reject a hearing request — Chapter 4, Section 8(a), quoted in full above.

Forty days to the hearing itself — Chapter 4, Section 11, quoted in full above.

Twenty, then ten, then ten business days through decision — Chapter 4, Section 13(a) and (b), quoted in full above.

Ten days for a facility (not a resident) to request its own hearing on a Program Division decision — Chapter 11, Section 22(b), quoted in full above; this is the facility's own appeal route, not a resident's.

Twenty-four hours, Wyoming Medicaid's own bed-reservation coverage line — Institutional Provider Manual, Section 18.5.1, quoted in full above.

What any of these periods means for a particular case is for the Department or the relevant Wyoming process to determine.

Source map

Captured: all seven, in tools/packets/wyoming-packet.txt. Pending: any Wyoming Medicaid rule chapter on nursing facility services or reimbursement beyond Chapter 22 (the Secretary of State's rules portal, rules.wyo.gov, serves its search only through a scripted form and the department's own rules page lists no such chapter — see finding 4); the Office of Administrative Hearings' own page; Wyoming Senior Citizens, Inc.'s own ombudsman page, which the department's page names as the contractor's site.

Change log

2026-09-27 — Deepened to a full page. Recaptured through the standing recipe (tools/recipes/wyoming.json, recipe digest 22f532dbc2fe) before writing; the fresh capture (tools/packets/review/wyoming-2026-09-27.txt) hashed identical to the standing packet and was retained as confirmed (tools/packets/history/wyoming/manifest.jsonl), promoting to tools/packets/wyoming-packet.txt with updated retrieval dates — no source text changed since the 2026-09-04 baseline capture. No new evidence was obtained: section 01 and section 02 are written entirely from the sources the baseline pass already captured, per the absence already recorded in the docket. Findings (6) through (9), continuing the baseline's numbering: (6) Chapter 11's Section 10 ("Discharge Planning") and Section 18 ("Transfer Agreement") are the only appearances of discharge and transfer in that rule beyond the docket's summary, and both are quoted in section 01 to show precisely what they cover — continuing care planning and hospital-transfer logistics, neither a ground nor a notice for an involuntary move. (7) The Medicaid administrative hearing (Chapter 4) is reached only from a level-of-care or eligibility adverse action (Chapter 22, Section 6(e); Chapter 4, Section 4(b)); nothing in the sources reviewed extends it to a facility's own decision to discharge, transfer, or relocate a resident, and section 02 states this scope limit rather than presenting the hearing as if it answered the docket's hearing-office row generally. (8) The Institutional Provider Manual's Section 18.5.1 is a Medicaid billing rule — reserve bed days are covered only under 24 hours, and a facility may bill the resident directly for reserved days beyond that if disclosed in writing — not a stated right to have a bed held or to return to it; no first-party return-or-readmission provision was found among the sources reviewed, and that absence is recorded rather than inferred from the billing rule. (9) Chapter 4, Section 6(b)'s ten-business-day (five in stated exceptions) notice period and Section 5(a)'s notice-contents list govern the Department's own adverse-action notice, not a facility's notice to a resident of an involuntary discharge or transfer, which these sources do not separately require; both are quoted at that scope. Capture pending: per the source map, unchanged from the baseline pass. Internet Archive: not yet submitted for this pass. Reviewer: Carrie Schluter, reviewed 2026-09-27. Corrections: hello@fieldassembly.net.

2026-09-04 — Baseline page built from the first Wyoming packet: docket, lede, source map, change log. Not yet captured or written: section 01 (the grounds, as Wyoming describes them, which on these sources would record the absence stated in the docket) and section 02 (the published process, including bed-hold and return, where the Institutional Provider Manual's section 18.5.1 is captured and states that "Reserve bed days during a resident's temporary absence are not covered unless the resident is absent from the facility for less than 24 hours."). Transports: every source was fetched by curl with a browser user-agent through the capture recipe (tools/recipes/wyoming.json); the six PDFs were read with pdftotext in layout mode, two of them sliced on body headings anchored with their first words (the Health Facilities Act out of the Legislature's 2.9 MB title 35 file; sections 18.4.4 to 18.6 out of the 373-page provider manual), and the ombudsman page by tag-stripping the body. No browser or session-fetch transport was needed. Findings: (1) Neither of Wyoming's nursing care facility rules, Chapter 11 or Chapter 19, nor the Health Facilities Act, W.S. 35-2-901 through 35-2-914, states a ground, a notice period or a resident appeal for a facility-initiated transfer or discharge; the words appear in those documents only for discharge planning, medication release, hospital transfer agreements and license transfer. That is recorded as an absence in the grounds and notice rows. It is a finding about what Wyoming publishes, not about a transport: every document was captured whole or as a complete article. (2) The only hearing in Chapter 11 belongs to the facility (Section 22(b)); the resident-side hearing the state publishes is the Medicaid administrative hearing of Chapter 4, reached from a level-of-care determination under Chapter 22, Section 6, and Chapter 4 names the Department as the recipient of a client's request without a street address, email address or form. (3) Chapter 4, Section 7(a) lists email, a verbal request, certified mail and personal delivery as the ways a client may request a hearing; Section 7(b) gives providers only certified mail and personal delivery. Quoted as published. (4) The department's Medicaid rules page lists chapters 3, 4, 16, 18, 22, 34, 44, 45 and 46 and no chapter on nursing facility services or reimbursement; a search-engine index attributes a "Reimbursement of Swing-Bed Services" chapter with a reserve-bed section to the Wyoming Medicaid rules, but the Secretary of State's portal (rules.wyo.gov) serves its rule search only through a scripted form, and no first-party address for that chapter was found. Capture-pending, and recorded as a transport result rather than an absence. (5) The Institutional Provider Manual carries its version in its filename; a new version will be a new address, and the review pass should look for the current file on the Provider Manuals page rather than treat the manual as withdrawn. Capture pending: per the source map. Internet Archive: not yet submitted. Reviewer: Carrie Schluter, reviewed 2026-09-04. Corrections: hello@fieldassembly.net.