Wells LTC Nursing & Rehabilitation

To pair with its decent overall score, we gave this facility an A- for our inspections rating. This score is far better than the facility's overall rating. Our inspection scores are tied to many datapoints located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Facilities that receive favorable grades in this category have very few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these places generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. This nursing home was hit with 4 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none were considered to be major deficiencies. This tells you that the government inspectors didn't deem any of these deficiencies an imminent risk to resident safety or health. A couple of minor deficiencies shouldn't lead you to cross a nursing home off your list.

We also gave this nursing home an impressive score in long-term care. This nursing home earned a B+ in this area, which turns out to be one of our more favorable scores. When facilities receive a grade in this range in long-term care it typically means it's well-staffed and is a quality place to live on a permanent basis. One of the statistics we considered in addition to nurse's aid hours was vaccinations. This facility administered the pneumonia vaccine to 100 percent of its residents. Vaccination is a great way to avoid unnecessary deaths and hospitalizations for the senior population. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0.04 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

This nursing home's next best category was nursing. We awarded it a grade of C in this category. This is basically a middle of the road grade in this category. The nursing rating consists of several components, many of which are tied to levels of nurse staffing. This facility provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per patient per day. This is a lower figure than we were hoping for. Finally, despite not having the highest total nursing hours per resident, this place actually performed admirably in the area of preventing major falls. This is generally a reliable indicator that a nursing home has quality controls in place.

Turning to our final area, this facility really did not perform very well. Due to a poor grade of F in short-term care, this is its worst category grade. Our short-term care grade is typically employed to gauge a facility's rehabilitation services. To offer highly graded rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally must have higher levels of highly skilled nursing. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists and other highly trained professionals. Not surprisingly, we found that this nursing home provides far less physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than the average facility. The last statistic we looked at in this category is the percentage of patients who ultimately returned home from the nursing home. This facility struggled quite a bit in this metric as well, with just 0 percent of its patients returning home. Unfortunately, this was well below the national average.