Imboden Creek Senior Living: No Infection Officer on Site - IL
Inspectors visited the 70-bed facility on ten separate days between October 24 and November 6, 2025. On every one of those days, there was no certified Infection Preventionist on-site. When they asked the administrator directly on October 31, she confirmed it. The facility, she said, does not have one. Corporate has someone who holds the certification, she added, but that person is "never in the building."
She said she knew the facility was supposed to have one. She said she was working on hiring somebody.
The inspection was a complaint survey, meaning someone had already raised a concern about the facility before inspectors arrived. The findings affected all 70 residents living there at the time.
An Infection Preventionist carries specific responsibilities in a nursing home: tracking antibiotic use, monitoring for outbreaks, reviewing diagnoses and treatment patterns in real time, and catching problems before they move from one resident to another. Nursing homes are required to designate a qualified person who remains on-site to do this work. Imboden Creek's own facility assessment, reviewed as recently as July 10, 2025, described that role as belonging to a member of the nursing directors team.
But when inspectors asked for proof, the facility could not produce a certificate for any employee working on-site. Not one.
The facility assessment described a system that sounded functional on paper: nursing directors would use daily reports, physician orders, pharmacy antibiotic reports, and quality measures to track infections and manage the program. The language was confident. The infrastructure it described, at least the human part of it, did not exist.
Nursing homes are environments where infections move fast. Residents share staff, share dining rooms, share common areas. Many have weakened immune systems, chronic wounds, catheters, or ventilators that make them more vulnerable to the kinds of infections that an Infection Preventionist is trained to catch early. The position exists because outbreaks in congregate care settings can be difficult to contain once they start, and because the data that signals an emerging problem, a cluster of urinary tract infections, a spike in antibiotic orders, residents presenting with similar symptoms, requires someone trained to read it and act on it.
At Imboden Creek, that person was somewhere else. Or perhaps nowhere at all.
The administrator's statement on October 31 was matter-of-fact. She did not dispute the finding. She did not point to a workaround that had been keeping residents safe in the interim. She said she was aware of the requirement and was working toward filling the role. Inspectors cited the deficiency at a level of minimal harm or potential for actual harm, with many residents affected.
The gap between what Imboden Creek's paperwork described and what was actually happening inside the building is the kind of thing that tends not to surface until someone asks directly. The facility assessment said the nursing directors team had this covered. The administrator said the only certified person was corporate staff who never came in. Those two things cannot both be true at once, and inspectors found no certificate to resolve the question in the facility's favor.
Seventy people were living there during the weeks inspectors came and went. The infection program designed to protect them existed, in the words of the facility's own administrator, somewhere off-site.
Full Inspection Report
The details above represent a summary of key findings. View the complete inspection report for Imboden Creek Senior Living from 2025-11-06 including all violations, facility responses, and corrective action plans.
Additional Resources
Data source: This article is based on inspection data downloaded directly from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) via Medicare.gov. CMS releases inspection reports in bulk; we publish the findings as documented by state surveyors in the official Form CMS-2567 Statement of Deficiencies.
Plan of correction: The CMS report we receive does not include the facility's plan of correction. Facilities submit plans of correction separately to state survey agencies and those responses may not be reflected in CMS data at the time of publication. The absence of a plan of correction in our data does not mean one was not filed. Readers who want information about corrective steps taken are encouraged to contact the facility directly or their state survey agency.
Corrections may have occurred: Inspection reports reflect conditions observed on the date of the survey. Facilities may have implemented corrections, staffing changes, additional training, or other remediation since the report was issued. We report what CMS provides and encourage readers to seek current information from the facility.
Editorial process: Inspection findings are extracted from CMS source documents and synthesized using AI, reviewed for factual accuracy against the original report by our editorial team.
Professional review: All content reviewed by Christopher F. Nesbitt, Sr., NH EMT & BU-trained Paralegal.
Last verified: September 5, 2026 · Our methodology
IMBODEN CREEK SENIOR LIVING in DECATUR, IL was cited for violations during a health inspection on November 6, 2025.
Inspectors visited the 70-bed facility on ten separate days between October 24 and November 6, 2025.
Health inspections identify deficiencies that facilities must correct. Violations range from minor documentation issues to serious safety concerns. Review the full report below for specific details and facility response.