The majority of hospital consultants in the State will not be able to work in the new co-located private hospitals to be built on public hospital sites under their existing contract arrangements, it was confirmed yesterday.
Prof Brendan Drumm, the chief executive of the Health Service Executive (HSE), told the Joint Oireachtas Committee on Health and Children current holders of what are called "category one" contracts - some 70 per cent of consultants - will not be entitled to work in the new hospitals under existing contracts.
While these contracts allow them to do private practice in the public hospitals they work in, they will not extend to them working in co-located private hospitals to be built on eight public hospital sites under plans announced in 2005 by Minister for Health Mary Harney.
But Ms Harney told the committee she hoped a new contract would be negotiated with consultants by the end of March. She insisted she had had no talks with the developers of private hospitals about the type of contracts which should be negotiated.
Separately, the HSE said yesterday that once it selects the companies to build the co-located hospitals at the end of a tendering process in mid-April, the developer chosen will be locked into agreeing to build the hospitals, subject to planning permission.
Tom Finn, assistant national director of the HSE's national hospitals office, said that while contracts would come later, once the tenders were signed these were "legally binding".