Wellsprings Post Acute Center

With an address in Lancaster, California, Wellsprings Post Acute Center is one of five available facilities in the city. This is a decent facility, with an overall grade of C. This grade was right in line with the city grade in Lancaster, which admittedly is admittedly a little below average nationally. One of the highlights of this facility's report card is its strong nursing grade, which is addressed in the next paragraph.

This facility's best category grade came in nursing. In that area, we awarded this nursing home a B+. It actually outperformed most facilities in this area. The nursing rating includes several factors, most of which are based on nursing hours. This nursing home provides an impressive 4.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, this place appears to be above average in several of the major quality-based metrics we assessed in this category. It performed well when it comes to avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls.

Additionally, we also wanted to point out that this nursing home received positive long-term care marks this year. We gave them one of our more impressive grades in that category, with a grade of B. This proved to be the facility's second highest grade. When nursing homes receive a grade in this range in this category it typically means it has plenty of staff and is an overall good place to live on a permanent basis. In addition to looking at the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility gave the vaccine to 99.86945 percent of its residents. Vaccines are vital to keeping patients out of the hospital. The last datapoint we looked at was the facility's hospitalization rate. While it had 2.02 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, its risk adjusted score was middle of the road since it had more complicated patients.

The next area we assessed is short-term care, where this nursing home received a grade of B- in this category. Our short-term care grades are thought to be most meaningful for folks in need of a nursing home for rehabilitation. Rehabilitation typically mandates higher levels of skilled nursing. Skilled nursing means not just nursing services, but also physical and speech therapy, as well as other forms of therapy. Unfortunately, we found that this nursing home provided fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than most other facilities. The key is determining what effect this had on quality of care. Lastly, we considered the number of residents who eventually returned home from this facility. We found that it performed respectably in this area with 46.9 percent of its residents returning home.

Unfortunately, this facility did not receive a favorable inspection rating. We gave it a just D in this category. Inspection scores relate to a facility's government inspection reports. Our inspection ratings weigh several factors found on a facility's inspection reports. You should be especially cautious when considering a facility that has severe deficiencies on its inspection reports. This nursing home was hit with a category G through L deficiency, which are among the more severe categories of deficiencies. This generally indicates that the deficiencies uncovered by CMS had potential to create actual harm to patients. Finally, this facility also received 13 substantiated complaints in recent years. This is yet another bad sign.