Heartland of Henry
When you begin looking for the perfect nursing home for a family member, you are faced with prioritizing a number of needs and wants. You probably want someplace that is close and convenient to home that won’t break the bank but offers all the necessary services and amenities your loved one needs to stay comfortable and in good health. When you’re shopping for nursing homes, however, do you look for a facility that is known for safety and protection from abuse?
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Nursing Home Abuse Prevalence
Resident safety may seem like a given, but you might be surprised to learn that nursing homes are reported for as many as five million cases of abuse across the US each year. Despite their promises of high-quality, individualized care, most nursing homes make potentially dangerous mistakes from time to time and all too many others make conscious decisions that increase the chances of outright abuse and neglect.
They either hire too few staff to meet resident’s needs or hire unqualified staff to perform duties more suited to highly trained professionals. This puts undue stress on caregivers that causes them to cut corners, forget things, or even lash out against residents.
Other poor practices include failing to have abuse-prevention policies in place and neglecting proper documentation of resident care plans. Both decrease caregivers’ ability to provide safe, personal care and increase the chance that a vulnerable resident will come to some harm.
It is always primarily the nursing home’s responsibility to ensure resident safety, but any concerned family member will want to do all they can to guarantee a loved one receives the best care possible. So, what can you do?
The answer goes back to your search for the perfect nursing home. It isn’t enough to put your relative in a home and deal with abuse later. The key is to put proven safe, quality care at the top of your nursing home needs checklist in an effort to prevent it altogether.
Selecting a Safe Nursing Home
Of course, you want to put your loved one in a nursing home that won’t hurt them, but how can you know which facilities may or may not be abusive? Certainly, no nursing home plans to abuse residents, and they all advertise excellent care in homelike environments.
Well, Levin & Perconti thinks we have the answer. It is our experience that careful research can reveal which nursing homes have a proven history of effectively preventing and managing potential abuse and which demonstrate questionable practices that create unnecessary risk.
We encourage you to begin your research on medicare.org. After compiling a list of nursing homes in your area, use Medicare’s nursing home compare website to look up how Medicare rates each of your choices. These ratings are updated annually and take into account each nursing home’s success with meeting standards for health inspection findings, staffing, and quality measures.
All of these individual categories are then combined to give each facility an overall rating. You can read more about each of these categories on the website, but the higher a nursing home is rated the better performing it is and the more likely it is to provide the type of dignified, expert care that generally precludes abuse.
In addition to nursing home ratings, Medicare also publishes health inspection reports on its website. These reports can give you an inside look at the things specific nursing homes struggle with. Read the reports for each of the nursing homes you’re considering and note how many health citations each has received in recent years and how severe they are. These kinds of details may help you decide between similarly rated facilities.
Finally, nothing beats doing a little bit of in-person investigating yourself. It is always advisable to visit any nursing home that you are seriously considering. You can use the information on medicare.org to pare down your list to a select few and schedule tours with these facilities.
This allows you to see for yourself what kind of environment each one supports. You can learn a lot from your own observations of how well the facility is maintained to how staff interact with residents and guests to the general demeanor of the people living and working there.
Nursing home tours are also the perfect time to ask questions. Bring a list with you and don’t hesitate to ask about anything that the tour doesn’t address. We suggest asking about staff-to-resident ratios, staff qualifications, and procedures and training for preventing and reporting abuse. You can even request permission to ask residents about their experiences there. After your visit, if you think of more questions, don’t hesitate to call or visit again.
As leading nursing home abuse attorneys, Levin & Perconti wants families to know how to find a reputable nursing home and to steer clear of any with poor ratings or other indications that they are low performing. We hope these steps of in-depth research help you narrow down your nursing home choices to one that meets all of your requirements and proves to be a safe environment for your relative.
We also want the research process to be as easy as possible, which is why we share information for Illinois nursing homes, like Heartland of Henry, from medicare.org on our own website. Please use this information to enhance your efforts in finding the perfect, safe caregiving facility for your loved one, and let us know if you ever have need of our nursing home abuse law services.
About Heartland of Henry
1650 Old Indian Town Rd.
Henry, IL 61537
Heartland of Henry is a small nursing home facility with 68 Medicare-certified beds. The location provides three levels of care: short-term, long-term, and outpatient rehabilitation. Services include 24-hour skilled nursing, a variety of physical therapies, dietician services, and more.
Medicare awards Heartland of Henry with an impressively perfect Much Above Average overall rating and the same for the categories of health inspections, staffing, and quality measures. However, it doesn’t have a perfect health inspection report. Its rating is so high because it has a well below average number of health citations, but the ones it does have all relate to a case of potential abuse. The facility also received a complaint against it. The complaint and a sample of the facility’s health citations are found below.
6/14/2018 Failure to develop and implement policies and procedures to prevent abuse, neglect, and theft. The facility failed to thoroughly investigate and report an injury of unknown origin, as required by the facility’s abuse policy. A resident had three bruises of unknown origin on their arm. Documentation states that only one staff member was interviewed about the incident and the state agency was not notified. The directory or nursing confirmed that the bruises were not investigated as abuse.
6/14/2018 Failure to timely report suspected abuse, neglect, or theft and report the results of the investigation to proper authorities. The facility failed to ensure an injury of unknown origin was reported to the State Agency within the required timeframe.
10/11/2018 Failure to immediately tell the resident, the resident’s doctor, and a family member of situations (injury/decline/room, etc.) that affect the resident. The facility failed to notify the physician of an ordered anticoagulant medication, not available and not administered for one resident.
Levin & Perconti, Attorneys Who Care
Levin & Perconti is very concerned by the state of Illinois nursing homes. We have seen the consequences of abuse in these facilities and are dedicated to holding them accountable. We handle all types of nursing home abuse, including cases involving
- Unauthorized Physical and/or Chemical Restraint Use
- Physical Abuse
- Alzheimer’s and Dementia Patients
- Falls, Improper Transfers, Drops by Staff
- Medication Errors
- Wandering and Elopement from facilities
- Pressure Sores
- Clogged Breathing Tubes
- Sepsis and Other Infections
- Burns
- Malnutrition and/or Dehydration
- Physical or Sexual Assault or Abuse
If you or a loved one have suffered harm from abuse or neglect at Heartland of Henry or another nursing home, call the experts at Levin & Perconti. Our attorneys have decades of experience guiding nursing home abuse victims through the legal process and have won over $160 million in verdicts and settlements for our clients. If you are ready to get the help you need, contact us online or call Levin & Perconti at 888-424-5757 any time to start with a free consultation.
Disclaimer: The above health inspection findings are taken from public records kept and published by Medicare and the state of Illinois and are not complete. Levin & Perconti cannot confirm that this page’s content includes the latest information available. Any corrections or additions made to these public records after the publication of this page will not be found here. For the most up-to-date information, visit www.il.gov or medicare.gov. This page is a legal advertisement and informational resource for visitors and is not endorsed by the named facility or any government agency. Levin & Perconti does not have any affiliation with the named facility.
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