Lakewood Healthcare Center

Lakewood Healthcare Center is a very-large facility in Downey, California. With an overall grade of F, we consider this to be a very poor facility. Based on our analysis, this facility is not a good fit for anyone. More information on this facility's category grades is available below. Its best category was nursing, which is addressed in the next paragraph.

Even though we gave this nursing home an abysmal overall score, we awarded it a B- for our nursing category. The nursing score features many datapoints. The most important factor is the amount of time nurses spend with patients. This nursing home provides an impressive 4.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This facility performed admirably in this metric.

This facility also didn't grade out poorly in the area of long-term care. Indeed, we awarded it a grade of B- in that area, which wound up being another one of its more favorable scores. Our long-term care ratings are important for residents looking for personal care. Once we assessed the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we then looked at the facility's vaccination data. This facility vaccinated 99.53227 percent of its residents against pneumonia, which is more than the majority of nursing homes. Lastly, we looked at its number of hospitalizations. We found that this facility had 5.45 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days. Although this figure is quite a bit higher than the national average, this statistic can be skewed for some facilities based on the medical complexity of residents.

Sadly, this facility's next best category was short-term care. As it turns out, with a grade of D in this area, it still fared somewhat badly. In determining our short-term care scores, we look at a nursing home's levels of skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists occupational therapists and other highly skilled individuals. This grade is typically a useful assessment of the facility's ability to rehabilitate patients. In this nursing home's case, we found that it offered less registered nurse and physical therapist hours per resident than the average facility. Lastly, we considered the percentage of residents who were able to return to the community from this facility. This wasn't a strength for this nursing home. We found that just 4.7 percent of this facility's patients returned home. At most nursing homes, about half of their patients are able to return home so this is well below average.

In the last category of inspections, this facility fared very poorly. Sadly, it received an F in our inspection category. We would advise paying special attention to any deficiencies on a facility's inspection reports when it receives this bad of an inspection score. We recommend you pay close attention to the level of severity of those deficiencies. This particular nursing home was assessed multiple deficiencies in categories G through L, which rank among the more severe categories of deficiencies. This generally indicates that the deficiencies identified by the government inspectors had the potential to create actual harm to residents. We are also concerned by the fact that this facility was flagged by CMS for possible abuse or neglect. We prefer to avoid facilities with this designation. Please do your best to find an alternative nursing home.