FRANKLIN GROVE – Franklin Grove Living and Rehabilitation Center is on a national list of 400 nursing homes with ongoing problems, but its status reflects continued improvement during the last several months.

A U.S. Senate report released last week identified 400 facilities nationwide with a "persistent record of poor care" – found by inspectors to have serious ongoing health, safety or sanitary problems, according to findings by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

Of those, Franklin Grove is one of about 88 in the CMS Special Focus Facility program, which provides more frequent inspections of facilities to see that problems are resolved; if improvements are not made, they could lose Medicare and Medicaid payments.

Its status was listed under “facilities that have shown improvement” after 7 months as a special focus facility, according to the most recent CMS update from May 16.

If improvement continues for a year, nursing homes graduate from the list, which means there’s “an upward trend in quality improvement compared to the nursing home’s prior history of care,” according to CMS.

In 2016, the Illinois Department of Public Health fined the 132-bed nursing home at 502 N. State St. “for failure to ensure proper working mechanical equipment was being used to appropriately lift residents, and failure to record the problem so it would not happen again,” a violation that investigators said contributed to a resident’s death.

In September, the Illinois Department of Financial and Professional Regulation placed a “refuse to renew” designation for the administrator license of former administrator Jessica Rogers for actions or omissions that violated the Illinois Nursing Home Administrator Licensing and Disciplinary Act.

According to case documents, Rogers provided substandard quality of care that included “failing to develop and implement policies and procedures that prohibit mistreatment, neglect, and abuse of residents and misappropriation of resident property; and failing to ensure that the resident environment remains free of accident hazards and each resident receives adequate supervision and assistance devices to prevent accidents.”

Sens. Bob Casey, D-Pennsylvania, and Pat Toomey, R-Pennsylvania, issued the report to bring attention to the disparity between nursing homes that qualify for the special focus facility program and the small number that are chosen. CMS publicly discloses those in the program, but not the candidates.

“When a family makes the hard decision to seek nursing home services for a loved one, they deserve to know if a facility under consideration suffers from systemic shortcomings,” Toomey said.

About 1.3 million Americans are nursing home residents in more than 15,700 facilities. The senators’ report noted that problem nursing homes on both lists account for about 3 percent.