IMO Conference:Advertising for new consultants in advance of an agreement on contracts is in the best interests of the public, Minister for Health Mary Harney told the Irish Medical Organisation conference yesterday.
She said the Government would go ahead with advertisements for the new posts next Thursday, with or without the agreement of consultant organisations.
The IMO had advised its members not to apply for the posts or co-operate with the interview process.
Speaking at the organisation's annual conference in Killarney, Ms Harney said she would much rather have the agreement of consultants' organisations, but in the interests of patients, would go ahead with advertising the additional 50 posts.
"I cannot see how advocacy for patients could suggest postponing the recruitment of badly-needed new consultants," she said.
"I certainly don't see how patient advocacy entails boycotting of new consultants by existing consultants and I hope it never comes to that."
The new posts to be advertised will include consultants in neurology, rheumatology and respiratory medicine, she said, and the HSE would have to be "innovative" in the recruitment to consultant posts.
"I hope young doctors in Ireland and elsewhere will be attracted to these posts," she said.
She dismissed suggestions they would be "yellow-pack" doctors and said she already had three inquiries to her office about the positions.
On consultant contracts, she said when she took up her post in 2004, she was told it would take three months to work out contract issues but two years later, issues were still outstanding.
She said consultants were being asked to have more flexible working arrangements.
"Instead of people working as lone rangers we want them to work as part of a team," she said.
Speaking on the nurse's strike, the Minister said that if nurses escalated their industrial action, patients would suffer.
She said other public servants and nurses in Siptu had placed their faith in benchmarking and the system had worked for them.
She also said she would consider commissioning an assessment to see if it was possible for nurses' working hours to be reduced to 35 hours per week without compromising the service to patients and on a cost neutral basis.
Ms Harney said she was sad and disappointed to see a picket placed by nurses outside the opening of a palliative care centre on the grounds of Kerry General Hospital.
She denied suggestions that the co-location project, which would see 1,000 new public hospital beds developed in private facilities in public hospital grounds, was unravelling.
The plans would result in the public system getting 1,000 beds for 38 to 40 per cent of their cost, she said. However, IMO chief executive George McNeice told the conference that Government plans to co-locate private hospitals on the grounds of public facilities would institutionalise two-tier medicine.
Mr McNeice said he was particularly concerned at the effect co-located hospitals would have on patients who need emergency medical care.
"There is uncertainty and a lack of detail about the basis on which they will operate and we would question whether they are clinically practicable.
"They have been presented as a response to the need to have more public beds available. Yet in the absence of any green paper or white paper on this initiative, we have been given no clear explanation as to whether other ways of commissioning beds within public hospitals were explored.
"There is a real fear among the medical profession and, I believe, the vast majority of the general public, of encouraging medicine for profit: this is a notion which can never and must never take hold in our healthcare system."