The Terraces at San Joaquin Gardens Village

The Terraces at San Joaquin Gardens Village is located in the large metropolitan area of Fresno, California. Sporting an overall score of A, this is clearly a first-rate nursing home. In fact, this is actually one of the three highest graded nursing homes in Fresno. This facility also received strong grades in all of the major categories we assessed. More information about these categories can be found below.

In addition to being a first-rate facility overall, this nursing home also excelled at short-term care, where it received an elite grade of A+. Few facilities performed better in this category. In forming our short-term care grades, we assess the facility's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, speech therapists, physical therapists and other types of skilled professionals. Our goal is to create a barometer for sizing up the rehabilitation services of different nursing homes. This nursing home is above the national average both in terms of its quantity of physical therapy and registered nurse hours provided to its residents. These are generally good indicators of quality short-term care. The final measure we assessed in this category is the number of residents that were able to return home from the nursing home. We found that it fared as well as just about any facility in California in this area with 74.2 percent of its residents returning home. With most nursing homes, fewer than half of their short-term residents are able to return home.

This facility has earned near flawless health inspections recently. We awarded them an impressive grade of A in this category. Our inspection ratings weigh several factors found on a facility's inspection reports. One key criteria we consider is the number and severity of deficiencies. Nursing homes with better scores in this area usually have few severe deficiencies. While this place had some deficiencies on its inspection report, none of them were serious based on CMS' scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

To complement its strong performance in other areas, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A for our inspections rating. There are a host of factors within this category. Most of the criteria relate to staffing levels. This place boasts a really impressive 4.5 hours of nursing care per resident each day, of which a significant percentage was provided by registered nurses. This is one of the most highly highly trained levels of nurses. On top of providing high levels of care, this facility also performed well in several of the quality-based metrics we looked at. In terms of the number of its residents suffering falls leading to major injury, this nursing home performed as well as any nursing home the nation.

Moving on to the fourth category, this facility also performed admirably in the long-term care category. In fact, we awarded it an A- in that area. This rounded out truly elite profile. Facilities that do well in this category typically provide patients with closer supervision and stay on top of routine healthcare services. In addition to considering the elite quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff at this facility, we also were impressed by the nursing home's vaccination statistics. For example, this facility gave the pneumonia vaccine to 100 percent of its patients, which is what we like to see. Lastly, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. With just 1.23 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, this facility had less hospitalizations than most nursing homes.