Spring Lake Village

Spring Lake Village is a small non-profit facility in Santa Rosa, California. Sporting an overall grade of A+, this nursing home is one of the most elite nursing homes we looked at. In fact, this nursing home has the prestigious distinction of being one of the 100 best facilities in California. This is an impressive accomplishment in a state with a long list of high-end facilities. As you will find below, this place performed just as well in our category scores. We gave it a straight A report card!

In addition to receiving a great overall score, this nursing home received an A+ in our short-term care rating. In the area of short-term care, we try to assess measures of a nursing home's rehabilitation services. We look at the nursing home's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses and physical and occupational therapists. This nursing home is the gold standard in terms of skilled nursing staffing. The facility provided roughly 50% more registered nurse and physical therapist hours per patient than the typical nursing home. This is what we look for when grading a nursing home in this category. Lastly, we looked at the number of patients who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that it outperformed the vast majority of nursing homes in the nation with 76.3 percent of its residents returning home. This is a significantly higher rate than most facilities.

Adding to its strong resume, this facility also received an excellent nursing score, with a grade of A. Our nursing score is mostly associated with the facility's nurse staffing. This facility provided 5.2 hours of nursing care per patient daily, which is among the more impressive figures in the country. A significant portion of those hours were provided by registered nurses, which are one of the most skilled levels of nurses. We were very impressed by these figures. On top of looking at levels of nursing care, we also looked at a few quality-based metrics in determining our nursing grades. These include minimizing residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We look at these metrics as reliable indicators of the caliber of nursing care being provided, since better care tends to reduce these problems.

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. Perhaps the most important factor we look at in computing our inspection scores is deficiencies. Deficiencies can be found on a facility's recent inspection reports. Facilities with better scores in this category most likely avoided the most severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. While this facility had a few minor dings on its government inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are labeled as categories G through L. This means the government inspectors didn't deem 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.

Turning to the next area, this facility was awarded a high-end long-term care rating. In fact, we gave it a grade of A- in this area, resulting in this facility receiving straight A's. Nursing homes that do well in long-term care tend to be well-staffed and offer extensive hands on care to residents. In addition to offering well above average levels of nursing care and other staffing, this facility administered the pneumonia vaccine to 100 percent of its residents. This percentage is also far better than the majority of nursing homes. This combination proved to be successful as this place also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0.92 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.