Ridgeway Post Acute
Rehabilitation Services in Petaluma, CA
Ridgeway Post Acute provides comprehensive rehabilitation services in Petaluma, CA, helping residents rebuild strength, restore function, and return to daily life with confidence.
Rehab and Therapy at Ridgeway Post Acute
At Ridgeway Post Acute, our rehabilitation and therapy services focus on helping each resident achieve their highest level of independence. Our interdisciplinary team develops customized treatment plans that address physical, cognitive, and respiratory needs, and they adjust those plans as you improve.
Therapy here runs out of two gyms and, for some residents, a sensory room built for a much quieter kind of work. What ties all of it together is your goal rather than ours. Getting up the stairs at your own house is a goal. So is holding a grandchild without help.
Short-Term Rehabilitation
Short term rehabilitation is a stay measured in weeks instead of months, and it has one purpose, which is getting you home. Most people arrive here straight from a hospital, after a surgery or a fall or an illness that left them weaker than they went in.
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Therapy runs most days. Physical, occupational, and speech therapy work from one care plan instead of three separate ones, so the goals line up. A licensed nurse is in the building around the clock, which is what lets therapy push harder here than an outpatient clinic safely could.
Your discharge plan starts the week you arrive, not the week you leave. Somebody will be asking early about the stairs at your house, about who will be there when you get back, and about whether the bathroom needs a grab bar. Families are often surprised by how soon those questions start. They are the questions that decide whether a discharge holds.
Medicare covers the first 20 days of a qualifying stay in full and days 21 through 100 with co-insurance. How long you actually stay depends on your physician’s orders and on how you respond.
Physical Therapy
Our physical therapy program is designed to improve strength, balance, and mobility. Physical therapists work one-on-one with residents to reduce pain, prevent re-injury, and help them safely return to everyday activities.
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Treatment takes place in our rehab gym with a focus on the patient’s specific needs, such as:
- Improving physical impairment
- Coordination
- Strength
- Mobility
- Pain
- Preventing future injuries
Most of physical therapy is walking, standing up, sitting down, and doing all of it more times than you want to. Getting out of a chair without pushing off with your arms is a specific, measurable thing, and it is also the difference between managing at home and not managing at home.
Your therapist will tell you plainly where you are. Most people prefer that to encouragement, especially when the gap between where they are now and where they were six weeks ago is large. Progress in rehab is rarely a straight line, and a flat week is not a failed week.
Occupational Therapy
Our certified occupational therapists help residents master tasks essential for daily living while maximizing their independence safely.
These tasks include:
- Bathing
- Dressing
- Eating
- Cooking
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They also assist residents with impaired vision and/or hearing to thrive in their environments. This can involve teaching patients how to use adaptive equipment like shower chairs, walkers, utensils, wheelchairs, and more.
Occupational therapy is the discipline families understand least and often need most. Physical therapy gets you walking. Occupational therapy gets you through a morning: out of bed, into the bathroom, dressed, and fed. Those are the tasks that decide whether somebody can live alone.
Our OT gym is set up to practice the real thing instead of an approximation of it. If getting in and out of a shower is the problem, that is what you practice, with a therapist standing next to you. Our new sensory room is inside this gym as well.
Speech Therapy
Our speech therapists assess and help restore abilities in the areas of communication, swallowing, and cognition. Treatment programs are designed to help residents affected by stroke, brain injury, dementia, and other neurological disorders. Speech therapists also work with residents suffering from hearing impairment, respiratory illnesses, and complex medical conditions.
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Goals of speech therapy range from:
- Strengthening chewing and swallowing
- Improving speech
- Voice clarity
- Comprehension
Swallowing is the part people do not expect to find here. Difficulty swallowing, which clinicians call dysphagia, is common after a stroke and it is genuinely dangerous, because food and liquid going the wrong way is how aspiration pneumonia starts. A speech therapist assesses it, sets the right diet texture with our dietitian, and works the muscles involved.
The cognitive side covers memory and attention, plus following a sequence of steps, all of which a stroke can disrupt without touching speech at all. If a resident is on tube feeding and working toward eating by mouth again, this is the team that gets them there.
Respiratory Therapy
We provide specialized respiratory therapy for residents with breathing challenges or sleep-related conditions. Our team manages CPAP and BiPAP therapy while monitoring respiratory health to improve comfort and overall well-being.
Respiratory services include:
- CPAP and BiPAP management
- Physiotherapy
- Oxygen
- Nebulized treatments
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Breathing well is a precondition for everything else in rehab. A resident who is short of breath crossing a room is not going to get far in physical therapy, so respiratory work usually comes first and then runs alongside the rest.
This team is also part of what makes our sub-acute care workable. Residents who arrive with a tracheostomy or who need non-invasive ventilation are managed by respiratory therapy together with nursing, around the clock. We provide non-invasive support only. If invasive mechanical ventilation is what someone needs, call us and we will help you find the right placement.
Music Therapy
Music reaches people that conversation sometimes cannot. That is not sentiment, it is how the brain is built. Musical memory sits somewhere different from language and it lasts longer, which is why a resident who has lost most of their words can still sing every line of a song from 1958.
We use music therapy in our new sensory room, paired with aromatherapy and a deliberately calm setting. It is most useful for residents living with dementia, and for anyone who gets agitated in the late afternoon when the day has been long and the building is loud.
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There is a physical side to it as well. Rhythm helps with walking, which is why moving to a beat is a real technique in neurological rehab rather than a nice idea. Breathing and voice work in speech therapy borrow from singing for the same reason.
Nobody has to be musical. There is no audition and no skill required. Listening counts.
Our Therapy Gyms
Ridgeway Post Acute has two therapy gyms. One is set up for physical therapy and one for occupational therapy. The split matters more than it sounds. A PT gym is built around movement, with room to walk and the equipment for balance and strength work. An OT gym is built around ordinary life, so it has the surfaces and fixtures you actually use at home. The two kinds of work need different space, and running them separately means you can work on walking in the morning and on dressing yourself in the afternoon without either session getting squeezed.
It also means more therapy happens. Scheduling is the quiet constraint in rehab, and two rooms is roughly twice the schedule. Inside the OT gym is our new sensory room, which is a different kind of therapy again.
Sensory Room
Our sensory room is new, and it sits inside the occupational therapy gym. Therapy in there focuses on the senses instead of on exercise. There is aromatherapy and there is music, and the whole room is built for relaxation. It is deliberately spa-like, which is not a phrase that comes up often in a skilled nursing facility.
There is a clinical reason for it. Agitation and sensory overload are common in older adults, especially in residents living with dementia or recovering from a stroke, and medication is not always the right first answer. A quiet room with controlled light, a familiar smell, and the right music is something to try before that.
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It is also just a good place to be. Some residents use it to settle before a hard therapy session and some use it afterward. Some use it because the building is loud and they want twenty minutes where it is not.
Ask your therapist whether it belongs in your plan. Nobody has to have a diagnosis to use it.
Cardiac & Pulmonary Rehabilitation
Our cardiac rehabilitation program supports recovery after heart-related events or procedures. Through guided exercise, monitoring, and education, we help residents safely rebuild endurance and improve heart health.
Residents recovering from cardiac events receive structured support designed to improve:
- Endurance
- Heart health monitoring
- Lower risk of future complications
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Pulmonary rehabilitation does the same job for the lungs. After a COPD flare, a pneumonia, or a long stretch on oxygen, the problem is not only the lungs. It is everything that got weaker while you could not move. Rebuilding that takes graded exercise with somebody watching your oxygen saturation, plus the practical work of learning to pace yourself and to breathe efficiently.
Both programs cover the unglamorous part too: medication and diet, and knowing which symptoms mean call the doctor and which mean sit down for ten minutes. That education is most of what keeps people from coming straight back.
Fall Prevention and Balance Training
A fall is what sends a great many people to skilled nursing, and a second fall is what keeps them there. Fall prevention is therapy aimed squarely at making sure there is not a second one.
Balance is not one thing. It depends on leg strength, on inner ear function, on how well you see, on how quickly you can correct when you start to tip, and on whether you are confident enough to walk normally. Fear of falling makes people shuffle, and shuffling makes people fall. Our therapists work on all of it.
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We also look at what actually caused the fall, which is usually not what people assume. Medications that cause dizziness or drop blood pressure are a frequent culprit. So are bifocals on stairs, a bathroom with no grab bar, and shoes with no grip. Our nurses review the medication list and our occupational therapists look at the setup you are going home to.
If you have already fallen once, this is the most useful thing therapy can do for you.
Stroke and Neurological Recovery
Recovering from a stroke requires a coordinated approach. Our team provides focused therapy to improve mobility, communication, and cognitive function, helping residents regain independence and adapt to their recovery journey.
Our team provides specialized support for stroke recovery, focusing on rebuilding strength, improving function, and helping residents adapt to new challenges with confidence.
Post-Surgical Rehabilitation
Following surgery, careful monitoring is essential. Our team provides attentive post-operative care, tracking recovery progress, managing symptoms, and helping residents regain strength safely.
Mobility & Independence Support
We encourage safe movement and independence by providing mobility assistance and guidance tailored to each resident’s abilities and recovery goals.
In practice this is the bridge between a therapy session and the rest of the day. A resident who walks well with a therapist at ten in the morning still has to get to the dining room at noon, and our nursing staff and CNAs work from the same mobility plan the therapists wrote so the two do not contradict each other.
