Brave move saw couple sell home and farm to launch Newbrook dream

Newbrook Nursing Home at 25

It could have been the typical successful rural Ireland family tale: a farmer and a nurse marry, she nurses, he farms, they raise a family, and spend their later years giving a dig-out with grandchildren. But that’s not at all how things panned out for John Noel and Sarah Ann McGivney of Streete, as Sarah Ann, unfortunately, died long before retirement was ever in prospect.

Even though they were raising a young family at the time, they sold the farm, sold their house and bought the plot of land on which they built and opened what was to prove to be their first nursing home, Newbrook.

Now, the McGivney family have six nursing homes; they employ a staff of more than 620 and care for 420 clients – and last Friday, at Newbrook, the family held a party to mark the 25th anniversary of the opening of that first venture.

Tragically, Sarah Ann died in 2016, but she is still very much remembered and revered by staff, as well as her family, revealed John Noel and his daughter Maria, who shared the story of how the enterprise came into being when the Westmeath Examiner called on a visit.

Maria, who gave birth to her seventh child just eight weeks ago, is director of the overall operation, while the CEO is Phil Darcy. A nurse by profession, Maria holds a master’s degree in dementia care, and previously served as director of nursing at two of the centres before taking up her present role.

In one way, it’s probably unfair to use the word enterprise to describe Newbrook, as John Noel and Maria view it as a home-from-home for its residents, and while clearly it has to run on a commercial basis, they stress that they see it as their responsibility to run it in a way that is in keeping with their Christian obligations to care for the elderly and also to care for the staff whom they employ.

“My mother was a ward sister in St Peter’s in Castlepollard and she felt there was a niche in the market to look after elderly people; that was what she loved, looking after the vulnerable, in particular, anyone with additional needs,” says Maria, explaining how her parents came to move into the field of caring for the elderly.

John Noel at that stage was focused on farming but always had an involvement in business and his interest was immediately piqued by Sarah Ann’s suggestion that they look into opening a nursing home.

“This was something that the two of them could come together on,” says Maria.

John Noel explains that he and Sarah Ann travelled to England first to look at whether it would make more sense to open a facility in the UK but decided they would stick with this country and so in 1997, after selling all that they owned, they bought the site on the Ballymahon Road.

Over the two years between then and actually opening the facility, John Noel did much of the building himself – but as he did so, there came a serious blow: Sarah-Ann, who was pregnant and studying for her master’s degree in gerontology, received the devastating news that she was suffering from cancer.

The couple had four young children at the time and as soon as their fifth child was born, Sarah Anne began her gruelling course of treatment. As she was a deeply private woman, few – even within her own family – knew that she had been diagnosed with cancer and was undergoing treatment.

The building work and the medical issues were proceeding at the same time, but eventually in 1999 the doors of Newbrook opened and from the off, it had 52 residents.

The year 1999 was well before the introduction of the Fair Deal scheme and so the profile of the residents was somewhat different, Maria explains. “For the Fair Deal you have to go through a medical assessment and a financial assessment and so a lot of people who come into a nursing home – because they will have passed a medical test – would really have quite complex needs, whereas back when we first opened, you’d have a certain amount of people in the nursing home who would have come in for social reasons,” she explains.

“That still happens, just not as much.”

The opening of the Newbrook chain of six nursing homes has provided locally-based care options for so many families, and has also transformed the lives of hundreds of families worldwide by opening employment opportunities beyond what were available to them in their own countries.

It’s no secret to say that all healthcare operators in this country, both public and private, find it difficult to get the staff numbers they require, and so the McGivneys have travelled to locations as diverse as the Philippines and India, Croatia, Poland, Slovakia and several other countries to recruit staff.

Their first recruitment efforts abroad were in the Philippines, and some of those Filipino staff who first came to Mullingar 22 years ago are still working with them. In fact, one staff member revealed this week that her own daughter – a trained nurse in the Philippines – is now coming over to work at Newbrook as well.

“It’s our biggest cost,” explains John Noel, stating that one year he spent over €400,000 just on bringing staff in from abroad, getting them trained and providing accommodation for them before they even started working. That figure did not include the salaries paid. Normally, he explains, the firm rents accommodation for staff because it is too difficult for people just arriving in this country from abroad to find accommodation themselves and they don’t have the references that landlords would tend to seek from potential tenants.

Both John Noel and Maria have been touched by the extent to which staff become involved with the elderly under their care showing genuine concern and affection for the residents in a way that ties in strongly with the ethos that guides their own approach to the care of the elderly.

John Noel explains that the nursing home is the residents’ ‘home’: “It’s not our home, it’s their home, so we have to make it as homely, as near to ‘home’ as possible.”

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