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.

We also awarded this facility a favorable score in short-term care. This facility received a grade of B+ in this category, which happens to be one of our better grades. In determining these short-term care grades, we look at the nursing home's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, occupational therapists, physical therapists and other types of skilled professionals. The goal is to devise a scale for sizing up the rehabilitation services of different facilities. Fortunately, it looks like this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not all facilities employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, based on the information this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The final measure we looked at in this category is the percentage of residents who ultimately were able to return home from the facility. We found that 6 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home as opposed to remaining at the facility on a permanent basis.

The next area we graded is long-term care, where this nursing home received a B- in this area. Our long-term care grades are meaningful for prospective residents requiring personal care. Once we concluded our assessment of the volume of nursing care, we next considered the facility's vaccination statistics. Frankly, we were a bit worried that this facility vaccinated only 87.70054 percent of its patients for pneumonia. Nevertheless, this nursing home keeps its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

The last category we assessed is inspections. We were surprised to find that this facility did not receive a favorable inspection rating. We gave it a just D in this area. This score is not on par with some of this nursing home's other category grades. Inspection scores relate to a nursing home's inspections. Since this information is collected by independent inspectors, we tend to weight it pretty heavily. Our inspection scores weigh several factors found on a nursing home's inspection reports. Generally, you should be most cautious when considering a nursing home that has severe deficiencies on its inspection reports. This particular facility was hit with 11 deficiencies by CMS. The only favorable thing we found is that none of its deficiencies were in the categories that indicate that they created a threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility also received 28 substantiated complaints in recent years. This is yet another bad sign.