The controversial Leas Cross private nursing home in north Dublin will reopen next month under new management, it was confirmed yesterday.
The home has been renamed the Swords Nursing Home and it has undergone extensive refurbishment.
It has also been downsized to contain just 60 beds rather than the 110 it had when it was forced to close in August 2005 after the Health Service Executive withdrew public patients from it.
Pat Shanahan, the chairman of Mowlam Healthcare which bought the property, told a conference on private healthcare in Dublin yesterday that all staff at the home would be fully trained.
"We will have well above average staffing levels in the home ... a 60-bed home is far more manageable and a manager and their team will ensure professional standards are delivered in that home," he said.
Mowlam Healthcare, which operates 11 private nursing homes across the State, is the largest private nursing home operator in the Republic.
Mr Shanahan said that overall in the nursing home sector there was an over-supply of beds in the west of the country and shortages in the east.
Meanwhile, Prof Des O'Neill, the author of the report into deaths at Leas Cross which was ordered after the home closed, told the conference that the Irish Society of Physicians in Geriatric Medicine had written to Minister for Health Mary Harney highlighting the fact that there needed to be the same monitoring of the quality of care provided by the State to older people in their own homes as there is of the care provided in nursing homes.