There is still a shortage of isolation facilities in many hospitals around the country, Minister for Health Mary Harney admitted yesterday.
But she said the new private hospitals to be built on the sites of eight public hospitals across the State would ease the situation.
Isolation facilities are crucial for patients with MRSA and other infections to prevent their spread.
"I believe the co-location facilities that we are building at many of our public hospitals, particularly our larger hospitals, will give us the capacity to reconfigurate the public hospital and to convert many of the private rooms into proper long term isolation facilities because we still have a shortage of isolation facilities in many hospitals around the country," Ms Harney said.
She also said that even in advance of the building of these co-located hospitals she had asked the Health Service Executive to ensure private rooms in public hospitals were prioritised for patients requiring isolation.
"I asked the HSE recently to make sure private rooms in public hospitals were in the first instance used as isolation facilities before anything else because there are a shortage of isolation facilities and it doesn't make sense to me to have some rooms ringfenced for private patients when very sick people with infections need isolation facilities," she said.
She was speaking to reporters in Dublin following her attendance at a conference on hospital cleanliness organised by the Irish Patients Association (IPA).
Ms Harney also said she wanted hospitals to look again at restricting visiting hours.
However, she suggested high rates of antibiotic prescribing in the Republic was the main reason MRSA rates were higher in Ireland than in some other EU countries such as the Netherlands. But hygiene and handwashing were also important factors, she added.
On the suggestion that up to 200 claims for compensation are in the pipeline from patients who picked up MRSA in hospital, Ms Harney said: "I know people will litigate, I've no doubt." But she said it would be a matter for the courts to decide each case.
Stephen McMahon of the IPA told delegates that 592 patients picked up MRSA bloodstream infections in Irish hospitals last year. "This cannot continue. We must arrest this level of infections in our hospitals," he said.
Prof Denis Cusack, the coroner for Kildare and head of forensic and legal medicine at UCD, told the conference he believed the number of deaths as a result of medical error in hospitals was under-reported.
Estimates for the annual number of deaths from medical error ranged from 950 to 4,000 a year, more than were killed on the roads, more than died by suicide or from natural causes, he said.
He added that MRSA was a notifiable disease and if a doctor knew MRSA was a factor in a patient's death they should inform the coroner.
Fear of litigation may be hampering such reporting at present, he said.
Prof Cusack also said there was no point in hospitals having "high falutin" principles for infection control if they didn't have enough people on the ground to implement them.