Everybody in the health service must begin to take responsibility for the way money is spent and ensure it is spent wisely, the newly appointed head of the Health Service Executive (HSE) said yesterday.
Prof Brendan Drumm said there was no point in doctors blaming administrators or administrators blaming doctors.
"We've got to get to a point now I hope with a new organisation where everybody within it begins to realise that the taxpayers are investing a huge amount of money in this service and then we can actually move forward on the basis that we all have a responsibility to ensure that that money is spent wisely and productively," he said.
Prof Drumm, who takes up his new job on August 15th, acknowledged on RTÉ's Morning Ireland that reforming the health service, which is among his key tasks, will be "very very difficult".
But he hopes a team of six people he will bring with him will get reform under way quickly by focusing exclusively on it.
The €400,000-a-year job was the biggest challenge he had ever faced, he said.
"I can well understand how a lot of people think that it's a crazy decision to make because who goes into health services at this level without significant worries? I certainly don't. I'm worried by it, but I'm challenged by it and I'm hopeful that I can bring something to it and that people within the HSE will benefit from my being there," he added.
Furthermore he said he wanted to focus on fundamental issues in the sector.
"I mean trying to deal with once-off issues like A&E and the doctor-only medical card is, to some extent, firefighting," he said.
Prof Drumm was offered the job of HSE chief executive in April but on June 1st negotiations between him and the HSE on the terms of his contract broke down.
He is employed as a consultant paediatrician at Our Lady's Hospital for Sick Children in Crumlin, Dublin, and professor of paediatrics at UCD and he wanted a guarantee he could return to work in Crumlin when his HSE contract expired in five to eight years.
Neither the HSE nor Minister for Health Ms Harney would fund this.
But UCD stepped in and offered to give him another professorship at the college at the end of his term of office with the HSE. This was acceptable to him.
Ms Harney insisted yesterday that no new funding had been provided to break the impasse.
"There is no additional funding committed by the HSE," she said.