Nichole Gutierrez, head of Patient Care Services Department at Powell Valley Healthcare, is not resting on the laurels of a second consecutive 5-Star Patient Survey Rating from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. 

“We’ve always tried to improve,” she said as she took a small break from serving hospital staff and community members at a barbecue Tuesday to celebrate the success. “We’ve always had initiatives where we’ve tried to improve certain things.”

Gutierrez said outcomes really started to improve when they decided as an organization to have inpatient staff take part in a 13-part series that talks everybody through how to care for each patient, what to expect, how to communicate. 

“It’s really just implementing standard of care practice stuff like bedside shift report, making sure we’re communicating in the room with the patient, letting them know their daily plan of care,” she said. “So it takes a lot of little pieces, and then if we dip, we are, ‘OK. what changed? What do we need to do next?’”

Last year that work led to a 5-Star rating, and this year they received word in June that, once again, the hospital was being honored. 

“It means so much to us, especially because it comes from the patient,” she said, adding that it speaks to the success of the entire staff. “From registration to discharge, every nurse, housekeeper, our food services, plant ops. There’s so many pieces that come into that survey to give us that score, and so to maintain it for two years in a row is just a huge accomplishment.”

The CMS rating is based on patient feedback about their hospital experience, including communication with nurses and physicians, cleanliness, responsiveness, discharge information, and overall likelihood of recommending the hospital to others. Powell Valley Healthcare exceeded both national and Wyoming averages across every category measured.

Among the survey results, 86% of patients reported that nurses “Always” communicated well, compared to a national average of 80%. Similarly, 85% of patients reported that doctors “Always” communicated well, compared to the national average of 80%. Patients also rated the cleanliness of their rooms and bathrooms exceptionally high, with 86% reporting these areas were “Always” clean, compared to a national average of 74%.

Significantly, 81% of patients reported they would definitely recommend Powell Valley Healthcare to family and friends, well above the national average of 71%.Still, Gutierrez sees room for growth. Right now, the three metrics she’s measuring are responsiveness of the call light, nurses communicating at shift change, and explaining medication side effects. 

“We’ve kind of coined our term, the red carpet experience,” she said, adding, “We want to treat every patient like they’re a family and loved one … We’ve got a pretty great team here.”