The Sequoias Portola Valley

One of the many reasons this turned out to be a great nursing home is that it received an A+ long-term care grade. This is simply as good as it gets in this category. Long-term care scores in this range generally require both around the clock care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine healthcare services. After we finished looking at the amount of care provided by nurses, we then analyzed the facility's vaccination record. This nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its residents against pneumonia, which is very impressive. Pneumonia is often a dangerous health condition for nursing home patients so we strongly prefer when a facility doesn't roll the dice on this issue. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

Another reason we rated this nursing home so highly is that it received an A+ nursing grade. This is simply as good as it gets in this category. Nursing ratings are mostly based on the facility's level of nurse staffing. This facility provided 0.6 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This nursing home performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a facility has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can generally be avoided if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

We also would like to alert you to the fact that this facility received a superb score of A in our short-term care area. Our short-term care grade is commonly employed to gauge a facility's performance with rehabilitation In order to have highly graded rehabilitation services, facilities generally need to feature better levels of highly skilled nursing services. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other highly skilled individuals. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home 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 statistic we looked at in this category is the number of patients who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We found that 5.9 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home.

Finishing off its excellent profile, this facility also performed well in the area of inspections, which is based on the nursing home's recent inspection reports. In fact, we gave it a B+ for that category, which is one of our better scores. Arguably the most significant factor we consider in determining our inspection ratings is deficiencies. These deficiencies can be found on a facility's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes with better grades in this category most likely avoided the most severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. While this facility had some minor dings on its report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means that the government inspectors didn't consider 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.