Kildare nursing home residents felt 'safe' despite Covid outbreak

Despite going through a fourth Covid outbreak of 2025, a nursing home in Naas that was recently inspected by HIQA found that residents felt “safe”, and that “feedback was one of satisfaction”.

This was on the same visit in June that the inspector discovered that one of the infected patients was still in a ward of 16 other residents, all of whom were only being cared for by a single member of staff.

This was revealed in an inspection of Craddock Nursing Home on the Craddockstown Road carried out by the Health Information and Quality Authority (HIQA) which was published last week.

“Overall, residents spoken with on the day of the inspection reported that they felt safe in the centre, and that staff were kind and helpful while providing support,” according to the inspector.

“The overall feedback from residents and visitors was generally one of satisfaction with the quality of care."

However, this was not to be a sugar-coated report as the nursing home was deemed ‘non-compliant’ in four of the 12 sub-criteria.

Firstly, residents reported call bell delays of 10 to 15 minutes, and on the day of inspection, two of them weren’t even working.

Also in June, the home was in a Covid outbreak with 18 of the 85 residents (21 per cent) infected, and “ inspectors observed … that some staff were not wearing masks, or were not wearing them correctly”.

“In addition, inspectors observed that not all residents were isolating in line with guidance, which posed a risk to the health and safety of staff, visitors and other residents”.

The inspectors did concede that the outbreak had started on 27 May, and “the majority of those infected were recovering, and were no longer symptomatic”.

However, as it was the fourth outbreak of 2025, the inspectors felt that “governance and management of the centre was not effective in managing the present outbreak”.

“The inspectors found significant risks to the care and welfare of the residents in respect of infection control, and that prompt action was required by the registered provider to ensure that the governance and oversight was effective to safeguard the residents”.

It was also noted that there had been a change of manager, and “while supports were available from the regional manager, some gaps in oversight were evident as a result of a new and inexperienced management team”.

Inspectors conceded that the “management presence in the centre had increased since the previous inspection and improvements were noted in some areas as a result of this. 

"Notwithstanding, at the time of the inspection, two clinical nurse manager roles were vacant”.

While it was noted there were four sub-criteria of non-compliance in the report, these were all in areas of staffing, training, governance and control, all the sub-criteria referring to the residents’ care were all deemed “compliant”.

With regard to the four categories of non-compliance, Craddock House has already notified HIQA of actions taken to bring these up to the inspector's satisfaction.

Craddock House Nursing Home is operated by Werlay Ltd, Karl Gallagher CEO, and is part of the Virtue Group, which has a number of such facilities nationally.