A nursing home owner says the future of the sector should be based on a 'care village' model, which would see residents get their own outside space.
It comes as a final report by the COVID-19 Nursing Homes Expert Panel will be published later.
The report provides an update to the Health Minister Stephen Donnelly on its work so far, its approach and the next steps.
Diarmuid O'Dalaigh is the owner of Oaklodge Nursing Home in Co Cork.
He told Newstalk Breakfast there needs to be a move away from the current set-up.
"We want to see the Oireacthas committee bringing forward a raft of measures that will fully protect them, and really guarantee - insofar as we can - as a country, because we owe it to these people, to ensure that they're safe and that they've a guarantee of high quality staffing and high quality care in safety.
"I'd like to see them looking at the long-term so that they can influence the planning to ensure that all new nursing homes or all new care villages or care centres would become a centre of care for a group of people to live in normal, domestic bungalows or households.
"The household model of care: so you've five to eight people living in a house with their own kitchen, with their own sitting room, their own little apartment, if you wish.
"So they've their own front door if they want to have their own visitors, a little garden area, where possible.
"That would be the ideal".
He said the current nursing home model being used here "came from the original workhouse model and the community hospital model and all that.
"And we really need to just radically change from that.
"Last year we applied for planning permission for a care village - and that would be a series of little households so people have their own little area of independence, but they're sharing within a small environment.
"And it would be ideal for infection prevention and control.
"This comes back to basics that protect people: that's hand washing, it goes back to infection with the preparation, basic hygiene and proper PPE."
"So I think we don't need to absolutely panic and react to this - we need to respond and get our experts onboard... and make sure long-term that we have a very coherent plan.
"And a plan that the traffic within nursing homes that you've an idea [that] visitors will come to the outside, a little visitors area outside each nursing home or each care house or each household in the future".
