Sonoma Valley Hospital Dp/Snf

One of the reasons this place received a great overall grade is that it received an A+ short-term care grade. This is as good as it gets in this area. Short-term care grades are often employed to measure a facility's rehabilitation services. In order to offer highly rated rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally must have better levels of skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other licensed professionals. Fortunately, it looks like this facility employs registered nurses. Not all nursing homes employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, according to the data they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The last item we considered in this area is the percentage of patients who were able to leave the facility and return home. We discovered that 6.6 percent of this nursing home's patients were able to return home.

This facility really excelled in the area of long-term care, where we gave it a grade of A. Only a select group of facilities performed more favorably in this area. Nursing homes that receive this type of grade in long-term care typically provide consistent 24/7 care to ensure residents are kept in good health. Once we looked at the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we turned to the nursing home's vaccination records. This nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its residents against pneumonia. Vaccines are vital to keeping patients out of the hospital. Finally, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

This facility received even higher grades in the area of nursing. In fact, it received one of our highest grades in that category with a score of A. Nursing grades are based largely on quantity of nursing care available. This nursing home provides 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 nation in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can generally be prevented by providing better nursing care, such as having a protocol of turning patients even once per day.

Finally, we also awarded this nursing home a B- for our inspections category. This nursing home didn't have any major weaknesses. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in calculating our inspection grades. One of those factors is deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of these deficiencies is usually more important than the number of deficiencies, as some of these can be quite insignificant. While this nursing home had some minor dings on its report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are found in categories G through L. This tells you that the inspectors didn't deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.