St John's Lutheran Home

St John's Lutheran Home is located in Billings, Montana. This facility is among the most impressive facilities we found. In fact, it received our absolute highest rating. You simply can't do any better than this facility. We also gave this nursing home strong scores in all of the major categories. More information about these categories can be found below.

In addition to performing well in its overall grade, this facility received high marks in our short-term care rating as well. As a result, it received our highest score in that category with an A+. Short-term care ratings are meaningful for residents seeking rehabilitation. Rehabilitation generally utilizes additional skilled nursing. Skilled nursing means a broad scope of services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, as well as other variations of therapy. One of this nursing home's strength is that it offers more than seven hours of care per week from registered nurses to each resident. This is really the gold standard in this area, as it's about 50% higher than the average facility's level of registered nurse staffing. The last datapoint we looked at in this area is the percentage of patients who who were able to eventually return home from the nursing home. It fared as well as just about any nursing home in Montana with 73 percent of its residents returning home. For most facilities, fewer than half of their short-stay residents return home.

One of the other reasons we rated this nursing home so highly is that it earned a very impressive nursing rating. Nursing proved to be its second best category grade. In that area, we gave this nursing home an A+. In calculating our nursing ratings, we weigh both nursing hours and the levels of licensure of those nurses. This place provides an incredible 5.3 hours of nursing care per patient daily. Out of that total, many of those hours were provided by registered nurses, which is one of the most highly highly trained levels of nurses. In addition to providing high levels of nursing care, this place was also above average in several of the major quality-based metrics we looked at in this category. It performed well in the area of minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers.

This nursing home has earned near flawless inspections in recent years. We awarded them an A in this area. Our inspection scores account for a host of factors found on a nursing home's inspection report. One key criteria we weigh heavily is the quantity and severity of deficiencies. Nursing homes with higher grades in this category tend to have very few of these severe deficiencies. This facility received 4 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none were considered to be major deficiencies. This tells you that the inspectors didn't deem any of these deficiencies to pose an imminent threat to resident safety or health. A couple relatively minor deficiencies aren't necessarily something to panic about.

The last area we graded is long-term care, where this facility was given a grade of B+. This completed a very impressive profile. Few facilities earned a B+ or better in every single category. In a long-term care setting, the nursing home's primary goal is to maintain residents' quality of life and keep them safe. This facility's vaccination statistics were not as favorable as its nursing hours. It gave the pneumonia vaccine to just 67.86469 percent of its patients. We would love to see some improvement in this area in the future. Although its vaccination rate was a bit lower than we hoped for, we were pleased to find nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. With just 1.16 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, this facility had less hospitalizations than the average nursing home.