Hawthorne Inn of Danville

In addition to receiving a strong overall score, this nursing home also earned an elite short-term care grade. We gave them one of our better scores in that area, with an A-. Short-term care grades are crucial for people needing rehabilitation. Rehabilitation typically utilizes more skilled nursing services. This means a vast range of services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, as well as other forms of therapy. Fortunately, this nursing home offers both physical therapists and registered nurses. Not all facilities offer both. The last datapoint we assessed in this area is the percentage of residents that ultimately returned home from the facility. This ended up being more of a strength for this nursing home. We found that it performed as well as just about any facility in Illinois in this area with 65.3 percent of its patients returning home. Unfortunately, at most nursing homes, less than half of their short-term patients return home.

This facility also excelled in inspections. We awarded it an B+ for that category, which is one of our highest grades. This is one of the few nursing homes with an overall grade in this range which received multiple category grades this high. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in determining our inspection scores. One critical factor is health deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of deficiencies is usually more important than the number of deficiencies, as some deficiencies can be relatively minor. Although this facility had a few deficiencies on its report, none of them were serious based on CMS' deficiency scale. Keep in mind that deficiency-free inspections are uncommon in this industry.

This nursing home's next best category was nursing. We awarded it a grade of B- in this category. While this wasn't quite as good as some of its other category grades, this isn't a bad score either. We weighed the levels of nurses at the facility, in addition to the number of hours those nurses were with patients, in computing our rating in this category. This facility provided 4.1 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is an impressive figure. Lastly, we also factored some quality measures into our nursing grades. Specifically, we looked at the percent of residents who sustained pressure ulcers and major falls. We view these datapoints as reliable indicators of the quality of nursing care, since better care tends to reduce these problems.

Turning to our fourth category, this nursing home received a grade of B- for long-term care, which we consider to be an acceptable rating. For prospective residents in need of a permanent place to live as opposed to rehabilitation, long-term care is an important category. In addition to considering the very solid level of care provided by nurses aids and other staff at this facility, we also were pleased by the nursing home's record for vaccinations. This nursing home administered the pneumonia vaccine to 100 percent of its patients, which is an impressive total. Finally, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. With just 1.44 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, this nursing home had less hospitalizations than most nursing homes.