Helia Healthcare of Champaign

To go along with its decent overall score, we awarded this nursing home an A for our nursing rating. This score is far more impressive than the facility's overall grade. When calculating a facility's nursing rating, we consider the amount of time nurses are caring for patients and the level of licensure of those nurses. This nursing home averages 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality-based metrics and this facility excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any nursing home Illinois in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can typically be prevented by offering better nursing care, such as having a policy of turning a resident more frequently.

This nursing home also performed favorably in the category of short-term care, with first-rate score of A- in this area. In computing our short-term care scores, we look at the nursing home's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses, speech therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. Our objective is to devise a tool for sizing up the rehabilitation services of various facilities. Fortunately, it appear that this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not all nursing homes employs these types of nurses. However, according to the information they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The final metric we looked at in this area is the percentage of patients that eventually returned home from the nursing home. We found that 6 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home as opposed to remaining at the nursing home on a permanent basis.

This nursing home's third best area was long-term care. In that category, we gave this facility a grade of B-. For long-term care residents, the nursing home's primary goal is to keep patients as healthy and safe as possible. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate residents. After considering the quantity of nursing care, we turned to the nursing home's vaccination statistics. Candidly, we were a bit alarmed this facility vaccinated only 87.70054 percent of its patients for pneumonia. Nevertheless, this place keeps its patients out of the hospital. It had only 0.05 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

Moving on the final category of inspections, this ended up being this nursing home's weakest link. Inspection grades are based on a facility's recent inspections. We gave this nursing home a score of D in this category, which is not a very good grade. Since this data is collected by independent inspectors, we take it seriously. Our inspection grades account for a host of factors included in a facility's inspection report. One of the most important criteria we rely on is the quantity and severity of deficiencies. This facility was assessed 11 deficiencies on its inspection report. The only favorable thing we can say is that none of these deficiencies were in the categories that suggest they posed a threat to patient safety or health. Finally, this facility also received 28 substantiated complaints in recent years. This is yet another bad sign.