Windsor Care Center of Petaluma

In addition to being a respectable facility overall, this facility really excelled in the category of inspections, where it earned an A-. Few facilities performed better in this area. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in computing these inspection grades. One key factor is deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of deficiencies is usually more meaningful than the number of deficiencies, as some of these can be quite insignificant. This particular nursing home had just a single deficiency on its inspection report and it was not one deemed to pose a threat to patient health or safety. Even some of the best nursing homes receive an occasional ding on their inspection report.

This facility also performed favorably in the area of short-term care, with high-end score of A- in this category. Our short-term care grade is commonly employed to measure a nursing home's rehabilitation services. To offer good rehabilitation services, facilities generally must have higher levels of highly skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other highly trained professionals. Unfortunately, it doesn't appear that this facility provided data regarding its registered nurse or physical therapy staffing. Finally, we looked at the number of patients who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 6.8 percent of this facility's residents returned home.

Next, we looked at the nursing category where we awarded this nursing home a grade of C, which is a decent grade. In determining our nursing grades, we look at both nursing hours and the training levels of the nurses. This nursing home averages just 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a very low figure. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as preventing major falls. Despite not having the most impressive total nursing hours per resident, this facility performed admirably in the metric of preventing major falls. This is generally an indicator that a nursing home has quality controls in place. Many falls could be avoided if a nursing home provides enough nurses to assist its patients.

The final area we scored was long-term care, which ended up being this facility's weakest area. We awarded this nursing home a D in that category. Unfortunately, this grade hurt the facility's overall profile to some degree. In a long-term care setting, the facility's primary goal is to keep patients as healthy and safe as possible. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate residents. Once we looked at the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we then looked at the nursing home's vaccination record. We were pleased to learn that this nursing home vaccinated 99.545456 percent of its patients against pneumonia. To our surprise, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. With only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, this nursing home had fewer hospitalizations than most nursing homes. Unfortunately, a few of its other scores in the category were not as favorable as these.