Arbol Residences of Santa Rosa

In addition to receiving a great overall grade, this nursing home also received an A+ short-term care grade. Our short-term care grades are considered to be more important for people needing rehabilitation services. Rehabilitation generally utilizes more skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing means not merely nursing, but also physical and respiratory therapy, as well as other forms of therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not every nursing home employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, according to the data they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Lastly, we assessed the number of residents who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 6.1 percent of this facility's patients returned home.

To complement its strong performance in other areas, we awarded this nursing home a grade of B+ for our inspections rating. Nursing grades are largely based on a nursing home's nurse staffing. This facility provided 0.7 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality-based metrics and this place excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any place the country in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can frequently be prevented by providing better nursing care, such as by having a protocol of turning residents at least once a day.

We also want to emphasize the fact that this nursing home was awarded a high-end score of A- in our long-term care category. Facilities that excel in long-term care tend to be well-staffed and offer extensive hands on care to residents. After considering the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we turned to the facility's vaccination record. This facility vaccinated 97.916664 percent of its residents for pneumonia. Vaccines are critical to keeping patients healthy. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

Finally, we also wanted to emphasize this nursing home's nearly flawless inspections. We awarded them a B+ in this category. This wraps up a very strong report card. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in computing our inspection ratings. One key factor is health deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of these deficiencies is usually more important than the quantity of deficiencies, as some deficiencies can be relatively minor. This facility was assessed 4 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none of the deficiencies were considered to be major deficiencies. This indicates that the government inspectors did not consider any of the deficiencies to pose an immediate threat to resident health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.