20 Nua jobs created in healthcare facility

Twenty new jobs are to be created in Clare when a specialist child and adolescent facility opens in the county in the coming months.
Nua Healthcare, which provides residential care, community outreach and day services to adults and children with intellectual disabilities, acquired brain injuries, mental health issues and Asperger’s Syndrome, among others, made the jobs announcement on Wednesday.
The company already has 14 facilities in Kildare, Laois and Offaly. It is expanding its services this year, creating 80 new jobs by opening additional specialist facilities in Offaly, Wicklow, Kildare and here in Clare. Currently, the organisation employs over 180 full-time staff.
A location for the Clare facility has yet to be identified but Ed Dunne, CEO of Nua Healthcare, believes the staff will be in place by June and that planning will not be required for the building, which he says is likely to be a 3,000 square foot, six-bedroom detached home.
“This will be a community-based care setting, not a hospital,” he told The Clare Champion.
“We are delighted to be announcing our continued expansion across Ireland and are particularly excited about our new child and adolescent service. There is a significant gap in services for children with complex difficulties in Ireland and this can often result in children being accommodated in inappropriate settings and sometimes overseas. We hope to provide a therapeutic, quality driven alternative to what’s out there at the moment,” he stated.
The specialist child and adolescent facility in Clare will be staffed by 20 full and part-time health and social care workers.
“We will have these positions filled before June. We don’t have a location selected yet; I would expect that to be done in the next two months,” Mr Dunne outlined.
According to Mr Dunne, himself a former social care worker, the Clare centre will represent a significant expansion for the company. 
“We set up the company in 2004 and we have been spreading ourselves across the midlands area for the past eight years, from Dublin to Laois.
We are now moving to the West of Ireland and thought that Clare would be the best location for us. It is central. We want to take it into the West of Ireland and the Clare, Galway, Limerick region. Clare gives us access to those three counties and it is a lovely part of the world,” Mr Dunne concluded.
Nua Healthcare is now recruiting nurses, social care workers and care staff for its new facilities.
Elsewhere this week, Genworth Financial announced it would be shedding 29 positions from its Shannon operation.
The company provides insurance products to a number of countries and said it had suffered due to the weak economy in Ireland and Britain.
Spokesman Guy Genney said while it is performing well in some of its markets, there is a need to reduce costs. “It’s a mixed picture, because the service centre in Shannon supports our offices across all of Europe. Some countries have bounced back and are growing nicely. In other areas, like Ireland and the UK, it’s very flat and a lot of our business in the UK and Ireland isn’t growing at all.
Unfortunately, we have to make a slight adjustment so that we keep competitive and our costs are in line.
“It’s very unfortunate, because we are still investing in Shannon and will probably have more roles to add later in the year but we have to make an adjustment now.”
He said those who will be made redundant “are in our UK and Ireland operations team so these would be people who help consumers manage their claims and there are also a number of support roles, it’d include trainers and things like that”.
Mr Genney said a consultation process with workers had begun and he expects most of the employees leaving to finish work by the end of this month.
“Today (Tuesday) is the start of a consultation process and then we’ll have to run through some criteria on who will potentially be impacted but they should be informed of the outcome in a few days and, depending on their notice period, they’ll finish at the end of March.”
The company is set to recruit new workers later in the year, he said, and these are likely to be in “technical areas and people with different language skills because over the last couple of years we have brought in jobs from our other European offices to Shannon and that’ll be the continuing trend.”
He said the company currently employs 442 workers at Shannon.
Genworth Financial established operations at Shannon in 1997. In 2010 the then Minister for Enterprise, Batt O’Keeffe, came to Shannon to announce it would be creating 117 new jobs over the next three years.