Ridgeway Post Acute
Skilled Nursing Services in Petaluma, CA
Ridgeway Post Acute provides skilled nursing care in Petaluma, CA for people at every stage of recovery. Whether you are healing after surgery, managing a complex medical condition, or moving from hospital to home, our team delivers attentive, individualized care.
24-Hour Skilled Nursing Care
At Ridgeway Post Acute, licensed nurses provide 24/7 care, including weekends and holidays. Unlike assisted living communities, skilled nursing offers around-the-clock clinical support for residents with ongoing medical needs.
Our team manages medications, monitors health changes, and responds quickly when concerns arise. Many of our nurses have years of experience caring for residents, helping them recognize subtle changes and address potential issues early.
If a medical need arises at any hour, a licensed nurse is available to assess the situation and coordinate care. We also work closely with physicians to ensure residents receive timely medical attention and ongoing oversight.
Sub-Acute Care
Sub-acute care is for people whose medical needs are too complex for a standard skilled nursing stay but who do not need to be occupying a hospital bed. Hospitals often call this level long term acute care, or LTAC. Ridgeway Post Acute takes the more serious LTAC cases, the ones with more intense needs, and it is a large part of why our referrals come from well outside Petaluma.
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In practice, we can accept residents who need:
- Tracheostomy care, with suctioning and site care around the clock
- Non-invasive ventilation, including CPAP and BiPAP
- Complex or non-healing wounds
- IV therapy and enteral feeding
- Close monitoring after a long or complicated hospital stay
A licensed nurse is here every hour of the day and night, and physicians round six days a week. That combination is what makes this level of care workable outside a hospital, and it is not something every building our size is set up to do.
If you are a case manager or a discharge planner, the question you actually have is whether we can take one specific patient. Call us and ask for admissions. We would rather give you a straight answer today, including a no, than leave you waiting on one.
Palliative Care
Palliative care is comfort-focused care for a serious illness, and it is not the same thing as hospice. Palliative care can run alongside treatment that is still meant to cure. The two terms get used interchangeably and they shouldn’t be, so it is worth saying plainly: choosing palliative care does not mean giving anything up.
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What we do is manage the symptoms that make a serious illness hard to live with. Pain. Nausea. Shortness of breath. Trouble sleeping. The goal is not complicated. We want you well enough to eat, to rest, and to have a day worth having.
Your family is in these conversations from the start. Decisions about how aggressively to treat something belong to you, and they change over time, which is normal and expected. Our nurses and our social services team keep everyone in the same conversation, so nobody learns about a change secondhand.
If care does shift from cure to comfort, hospice is coordinated through the agency your family chooses and our nurses continue the daily care. Nothing about your room or your routine has to change.
Respite Care
Respite care is a short stay, usually a few days to a few weeks, that gives a family caregiver a break. If you have been caring for someone at home, you already know why this exists. Caregiving is a job that does not have an evening or a weekend, and people run out.
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During a respite stay your loved one gets the same care any resident here gets: a licensed nurse on site around the clock, meals built around their physician’s orders, help with bathing and dressing, and a place on the activities calendar if they want it. It is not a holding pattern. They are a resident for as long as they are here.
Families use respite care for a surgery of their own, for a trip that cannot be moved, or because they have simply not slept properly in months. Any of those is reason enough and we are not going to ask you to justify it.
It is also a low-risk way to see how a building feels before a longer stay is ever on the table. Quite a few of our long term residents started with a week.
Long-Term Care
Long term care is for people whose medical needs mean living here instead of at home. That is a hard sentence for most families to arrive at, and it is usually arrived at slowly, after a fall or a hospital stay or a year of near-misses.
What we can tell you is that the routine steadies out. The room becomes yours and you are welcome to bring the comforts of home into it. The faces stay familiar, which is the practical benefit of a staff that measures its tenure here in decades. Meals get built around what you like. The activities calendar changes every month and you are free to skip all of it.
The clinical side does not relax because the stay is long. A licensed nurse is here every hour and physicians round six days a week. Your care plan gets reviewed as things change instead of filed away.
Diabetes Care
Diabetes care here covers the daily work of keeping blood sugar in range and the longer job of keeping the complications away. Our nursing team handles:
- Blood glucose monitoring and tracking
- Insulin administration
- An exercise plan built with therapy
- Menu planning with our registered dietitian
- Education for you and for whoever helps you at home
Read More About Diabetes Care
The monitoring is the visible part. The part that matters more is what the numbers are watched for. Poorly controlled blood sugar is why a small sore on a foot becomes a wound that takes months, and it is why our nursing and wound care teams check the skin on every diabetic resident instead of waiting for someone to report a problem.
Diet is where most of the real progress happens and also where most of the resistance is, because nobody wants to be told what they can eat. Our dietitian talks with you about what you actually like before anything gets written down. A plan you will follow beats a better plan you won’t.
If you are going home on insulin, we teach you the routine here, with a nurse in the room, well before discharge day.
Wound Care & Complex Wound Treatment
Our wound care program focuses on healing complex wounds using advanced techniques and evidence-based practices. We treat surgical wounds, pressure injuries, and chronic conditions while working to prevent infection and promote faster healing.
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A wound that has stopped healing on its own is a different problem from a fresh one, and it usually has a cause underneath it that has nothing to do with the wound itself. Circulation. Blood sugar. Pressure from sitting the same way for months. Nutrition, more often than people expect, because skin does not rebuild without protein. We look at all of that, because treating the surface alone is how a wound closes and then opens again six weeks later.
Day to day this means regular assessment, dressing changes on a schedule instead of whenever someone gets to it, offloading pressure with positioning and the right surfaces, and keeping the rest of your skin intact while the wound closes.
Wound care is one of the reasons hospitals send us their harder discharges, and it is closely tied to our sub-acute work.
Individualized Care Plans
Your care plan is a written map of your medical needs and your goals, and it is built by the people who actually see you: your nurses, your therapists, social services, and our dietitian. It is not a form filed on admission. It is the document the whole building works from.
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Two things make a care plan useful instead of ceremonial. The first is that it names what you want, not only what is wrong with you. “Walk to the dining room without the walker” is a goal. “Improve functional mobility” is paperwork. The second is that it gets reviewed as you change, and you and your family are in the room when it does.
If something is not working, that meeting is where to say so. Families often arrive expecting to be talked at and are surprised to find they are being asked. Bring your questions. Bring the things you are worried about and have not mentioned to a nurse.
Medication & Pain Management
We take a proactive approach to pain management, because comfort is what makes the rest of a recovery possible. By combining clinical treatments with personalized care plans, we work to reduce discomfort and improve overall quality of life.
Medication and pain management sit together here for a practical reason. Uncontrolled pain stops therapy cold, and a resident who cannot get through a therapy session does not go home on schedule. So the two get managed as one problem rather than two.
Read More About Medication & Pain Management
On the medication side, our nurses manage everything you take while you are here and watch for interactions and side effects, which matter more than people realize when someone arrives from a hospital on a list of fourteen drugs. On the pain side, we ask, we adjust, and we ask again. Pain changes across a recovery and a dose that was right in week one is often wrong by week three.
Before discharge we go through the full list with you and with whoever is helping you at home, out loud, until it makes sense. Medication errors after a hospital or nursing stay are common and almost all of them happen in that first week back.
IV Therapy and Enteral Feeding
Diabetes care here covers the daily work of keeping blood sugar in range and the longer job of keeping the complications away. Our nursing team handles:
- IV medication administration and hydration therapy
- Nutritional support through intravenous delivery
- Ongoing monitoring for safety and effectiveness
Read More About IV Therapy and Enteral Feeding
Enteral feeding is the other route, and it is a different thing: nutrition delivered through a tube to the stomach or small intestine, for residents who cannot safely swallow enough to sustain themselves. Our nurses manage feeding tubes, the pump schedule, site care, and the ordinary complications that come with both. If a resident is working toward eating by mouth again, speech therapy runs alongside this.
Case managers ask about this pairing often, because a patient who needs IV access or tube feeding is a patient many buildings will not take. We will. Call admissions with the specifics.
Catheter, Colostomy and Ileostomy Care
Catheter and ostomy care is skilled nursing work that takes trained hands and, just as much, a matter-of-fact attitude. Most residents who arrive with a new colostomy or ileostomy are not worried about the clinical side. They are worried about dignity and about smell, and about whether anyone is going to make them feel like a burden.
Read More About Catheter, Colostomy and Ileostomy Care
Our nurses manage the daily care: appliance changes, skin care around the stoma, catheter care and monitoring for infection, and the adjustments that come with a new ostomy as your body settles. None of it is treated as unusual, because for us it isn’t.
The other half of the job is teaching. If you are going home with an ostomy or a catheter, you or the person helping you needs to be able to manage it confidently, not just watch someone else do it. We start that well before discharge and we keep going until you have done it yourself, more than once, without a nurse’s hands.
Nutrition and Hydration Programs
Eating and drinking enough is harder than it sounds when you are recovering. Appetite drops after surgery. Medications change how food tastes. Swallowing gets harder after a stroke. Thirst is an unreliable signal in older adults, so dehydration arrives quietly and shows up as confusion or a fall before it shows up as thirst.
Read More About Nutrition and Hydration Programs
Our registered dietitian meets with you shortly after you arrive to ask what you like to eat, and your plan follows your physician’s orders from there. Requests get passed along through the CNAs, who are the ones actually at the table.
We track weights and intake monthly, along with lab data. That is the part residents never see and it is the part that works, because it catches the person who has quietly stopped finishing meals before anyone thinks to mention it.
If something on the tray is wrong, say so. We would rather remake a plate than watch you push it around.
