The Ellison John Transitional Care Center

The Ellison John Transitional Care Center is a large facility located in Lancaster, California. With an overall grade of D, this is a lower end facility. This is not the worse facility we found, however, we would still be very reluctant to recommend it. If you aren't deterred by this place's profile, feel free to continue reading to find out about its category grades. We discuss inspections in the next section.

Although we were not high on this place's overall performance, it actually received an impressive inspection report this year with few dings from the applicable government inspectors. As a result, it received one of our better grades in that area with a grade of B+. Arguably the most critical factor we consider in determining our inspection grades is deficiencies. Deficiencies can be found on a facility's recent inspection reports. It is typically in your best interest to avoid nursing homes that have too many severe deficiencies. This nursing home was hit with 9 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none were considered to be severe deficiencies. This tells you that the inspectors did not consider any of the deficiencies to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. A few minor deficiencies aren't necessarily the end of the world.

This nursing home's next highest category was short-term care. In that area, we gave this facility a B-. Our short-term care grade is often used to measure a nursing home's performance with rehabilitation. To have quality rehabilitation services, facilities generally must have better levels of skilled nursing services. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists and other types of therapists. One of this nursing home's strengths is physical therapy hours. We found that it offers more hours with physical therapists to its residents than most facilities. The last metric we considered in this category is the percentage of patients that eventually returned home from the nursing home. This place fared better than most facilities in this metric with 49.9 percent of its residents returning home.

This facility's next best category was nursing, but even there it received a grade of just D. This is still a well below average grade. In determining a nursing home's nursing rating, we weigh the quantity of hours nurses are with residents as well as the level of licensure of the nurses. In this facility's case, quantity of care does not appear to be the problem. According to its CMS reports, this nursing home provided an average of 5 hours of nursing care per resident daily, which was above the national average. Despite being above average in terms of nursing hours, this nursing home had abysmal scores in some of the quality-based measures we looked at in determining our nursing scores. For starters, we looked at the percent of residents sustaining pressure ulcers. This facility was at more than double the national average in this statistic. This is quite alarming when you consider that many bed sores are believed to be preventable with better nursing care. This ended up sealing the facility's fate of receiving a very poor nursing grade.

The last area we assessed was long-term care, ended up being this facility's weakest category. We gave this facility a D in that category. In a long-term care environment, the facility's primary goal is to keep patients healthy and safe. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate residents. In addition to assessing the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. Fortunately, this nursing home provided the vaccine to 100 percent of its residents, which is an above average statistic. To our surprise, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. Although it had 3.63 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, its risk adjusted statistic was not bad since it had some more complicated patients.