URBANA — Jan Sherbert and her husband raised three daughters together and were married for over 40 years. In 2020, Sherbert’s husband suffered a severe stroke and ended up needing skilled nursing care because he was unresponsive and paralyzed.
After being discharged from the hospital, he was sent to the nearest facility with an available bed — an hour’s drive away from their home in Urbana.
“It was an hour there and an hour back. And of course …you are emotional going and you’re even more emotional coming home,” she said. “Every day I’d come home and I would just collapse in a heap.”
She eventually decided to bring him home and take care of him herself.
“This was like maybe not even a week that I could put up with it,” Sherbert said, holding back tears.
She went online to find information about how to care for her husband, who she said was in terrible condition: He had lost 40 pounds and was in a lot of pain. He ended up dying after a year of at-home hospice care.
Stories like Sherbert’s are not uncommon in Champaign County. Local health care providers say only about 10% of patients discharged are placed in facilities within a 25-mile radius, according to a needs assessment focused on older adults published in 2024 by C-U Public Health.
More than half of discharged patients are placed beyond 25 miles, including about 20% over 45 miles away. And the skilled nursing bed shortage has ripple effects throughout the health care ecosystem, putting a strain on local hospitals.
Sherbert’s experience prompted her to get involved in a grassroots initiative to address the skilled nursing care shortage.
She’s part of the nonprofit Advocates for Aging Care and is hopeful a new initiative that has garnered state support will enable the county to attract a new nursing home developer to help address the shortage.
The scale of the shortage
Champaign County only has about 400 skilled nursing beds available but will need 748 beds by 2026, according to projections from C-U Public Health. It is one of only two counties in the state that has a skilled nursing bed shortage; Livingston County is short nine beds.
Among older adults, 70% of older adults surveyed by C-U Public Health reported difficulty securing a placement in a long-term care, rehab, or skilled nursing facility. Four out of 5 respondents said they struggled due to a lack of facilities. Other reported issues, affecting about a third of respondents, included limited services, staffing shortages and affordability.
Skilled nursing facilities are often housed inside of nursing homes. They are meant to be temporary places for people who are recovering from severe illness or injury.
Champaign County is home to four skilled nursing facilities: Accolade Health Care of Savoy, Clark-Lindsey Village, Country Health and Illini Heritage Rehab & HC.
Since 2019, three facilities that offered skilled nursing care in Champaign County have closed down. William “Avi” Rothner purchased the facilities in 2018 and 2019 only to end up closing them after they did not make enough money to sustain operations.
Rothner said in response to email questions that the facilities had to close because they didn’t meet area occupancy needs at that time. He requested to sell the closed-down skilled nursing facilities to a new owner to turn them into an addiction treatment center but the county board refused Rothner’s request.
Underlying causes and ripple effects
One reason skilled nursing facilities tend to run out of money is because they often rely on too-low payments from Medicaid, the federal-state health insurance program that covers people who are low-income or disabled, said Cathy Emanuel, the committee chair for Advocates for Aging Care.
Medicaid often covers elderly people who’ve run out of money due to long-term nursing home stays.
“If you’re there very long, you use up all your assets and you move to being [on] Medicaid. In many cases, in Illinois, the reimbursement for Medicaid is not even enough to cover the actual costs of providing that care,” Emanuel said.
Many nursing homes close when for-profit companies decide to buy them, according to Naoko Muramatsu, a professor of community health sciences at the University of Illinois Chicago.
“Nationwide, there are private equity companies. They buy up lots of health care facilities, nursing homes, hospitals, many other things,” she said. “They need to get profit — not to care for older people or people who need care. So the whole focus is profit, and that’s the problem.”
The shortage of beds has ripple effects on hospitals across central Illinois, said Matt Nieukurk, OSF HealthCare’s director of home health and skilled nursing facilities.
When people can’t be safely discharged after an injury or illness, he said they end up stuck in the hospital, which can strain local hospital resources.
“What we’re running into now is the baby boomers that are getting to that age where they’re going to start needing placement,” he said. “Because there’s not enough beds, it’s just going to become a bigger and bigger issue for those hospitals in that area.”
Grassroots efforts aim to address the shortage
Advocates for Aging Care, with the help of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Parkland College, and Carle Hospital, is working to create a new nursing home in Champaign County. Earlier this year, they received a $500,000 state grant for the project.
“We are talking to some potential developers who can come in and develop a facility here,” Emanuel said. “If we can bring the community together to support that effort. We think we might be able put together enough of an incentive package to attract somebody here.”
If approved, the goal is for the new facility to have 120 beds. Emanuel said they’re hoping to break ground next summer and have the facility open the following year.
Jan Sherbert said she’s optimistic the project will be successful and create positive change for how elderly people are cared for.
“It’s very promising. We just need everybody to come together for this support,” she said. “I think Champaign County may sort of become a focal point of how we can make changes.”