Palo Alto Sub-Acute and Rehabilitation Center

In addition to receiving a great overall grade, this nursing home received an A+ in the area of short-term care. In calculating our short-term care grades, we analyze the facility's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, respiratory therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. Our objective is to create a barometer for sizing up the rehabilitation services of various facilities. Fortunately, it looks like this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not all nursing homes employs these skilled professionals. However, according to the information they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Finally, we looked at the number of residents who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 6.1 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.

Adding to its impressive resume, this nursing home also excelled in our nursing category. In fact, we awarded it a grade of A for that category. Nursing ratings are mostly associated with the nursing home's level of nurse staffing. This facility provided 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality measures 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 facility the country in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can typically be prevented by providing better nursing care, such as by having a policy of turning residents more often.

In addition, this facility also earned excellent inspections in recent years. We gave it one of our best scores in that category, with an A-. Our inspection ratings are based on several datapoints found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes that excel in this area typically have very few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these places should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. This place received 2 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none of the deficiencies were considered severe. This tells you that the government inspectors didn't deem any of the deficiencies to pose an immediate threat to resident safety or health. Remember that deficiency-free inspection reports are uncommon in this industry.

The next category we looked at was long-term care. This facility was given a better than average long-term care score in our assessment, with a C. Even though this is not as elite as a few of its other grades, this remains a decent grade for that area. If you are seeking anything other than rehabilitation, you should take a close look at long-term care grades. On top of assessing the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we analyzed the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility gave the vaccine to 98.8764 percent of its residents. Finally, this facility was also able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.