St John's Nursing Home

With an address in Jackson, Wyoming, St John's Nursing Home is the only facility we identified there. It looks like this nursing home is among the most elite facilities we assessed. Receiving an A+ in our grading system requires top-notch performance across the board. In addition, this is a hospital-based nursing home, which is a positive for prospective residents with significant health conditions. Headlining this place's stellar report card is its inspection rating, which is addressed in the next paragraph.

To go along with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A+ for our inspections rating. Perhaps the most significant factor we consider in determining our inspection ratings is deficiencies. These deficiencies can be found on a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places with better scores in this area most likely avoided the more severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. Fortunately, although this nursing home had a few minor dings on its inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means 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. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This facility also received an A+ short-term care grade, rendering it one of the few facilities to be given several A+ category grades. With our short-term care category, we attempt to create a fair gauge for rehabilitation services. In doing so, we look at the nursing home's levels of skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as occupational therapy. This nursing home elevated its grade in this area by offering more care from registered nurses than a typical nursing home. The final metric we looked at in this category is the percentage of patients who were able to leave the facility and return home. This place performed as well as just about any nursing home in Wyoming in this area with 80.8 percent of its patients returning home. With most nursing homes, less than half of their short-term residents are able to return home.

We also wanted to emphasize the fact that this facility received an impressive grade of A- in our nursing category. There are a number of criteria within this category. Many of the factors relate to nurse staffing. This place provides an incredible 4.8 hours of nursing care per resident per day. 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 offering impressive levels of nursing care, this place also fared well in several of the quality measures we looked at. By way of illustration, in terms of the percentage of its residents suffering from pressure ulcers, this nursing home performed better than the national average. This is often a good indicator that a nursing home has reliable quality controls. Pressure ulcers can typically be avoided with better nursing care and having a policy of regularly turning patients to prevent bed sores.

The final category we scored is long-term care, where this facility was given an A-. This rounded out a very favorable report card. Few facilities received an A- or better in every category. When nursing homes receive a grade in this range in long-term care it generally means it's well-staffed and is an overall good place to reside on a permanent basis. On top of looking at the impressive level of care provided by aids and other staff at this facility, we also were happy with the nursing home's vaccination data. For example, this facility administered the pneumonia vaccine to 100 percent of its residents, which is what we like to see. Lastly, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. It had only 0.51 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.