Large numbers of new hospital beds are likely to be recommended in a report to the Minister for Health and Children in the next few weeks.
The possibility of providing hospitals to deal only with planned, non-urgent cases is also being considered, Mr Martin said.
The Minister told the IMO conference he expected the report to be "quite significant in terms of the number of beds required". It would take "a number of years to build extra wards and so on" to accommodate the new beds.
The question of providing facilities which would carry out only elective work is being considered in the eastern region in particular, he said, as admissions through emergency departments of the main hospitals are taking up beds which would otherwise be used for elective work.
It was important to address inequalities in access to the health system, he told the conference. "What you can pay and where you live still make an enormous difference to the way you experience the health system," he said.
"If the health system is central to civilised living, then it follows as day follows night that we must build into our strategy methods of ironing out those unacceptable inequalities."
Mr Martin highlighted his and the Government's support for the proposals in the report of the Medical Manpower Forum. These proposals would see many hundreds of extra consultants appointed.
The IMO has complained that the Government's statement of support for the proposals was made conditional on what it would cost to implement them - which is not yet known - and it has accused the Department of Finance of interfering in health service reform.
While the Minister repeated his support for the proposals, he stopped short of guaranteeing the necessary money to implement them. "I will continue to do my best to provide the resources necessary to implement the reforms that we all want," he said.
Later the new IMO president, Dr Mick Molloy, told the conference he had seen "a sea change in the delivery of healthcare as a direct result of the cutbacks of the late 1980s".
"Those patients who do not have a problem classified as an emergency get a particularly raw deal at present and there is neither quality nor equity for this group," he said.
Services for emergency patients have also worsened, he said.
"I have been horrified recently to learn of patients being medically assessed as in need of admission and having to sit overnight on chairs in emergency departments while there are empty wards in hospitals," he said.
Meanwhile, a report on public health services in the State has described the task of infectious-disease control carried out by community care doctors as a "disaster waiting to happen". Public health doctors at the IMO conference were briefed on the CAPITA management consultants' review of their activities which will be published in full this week.
The report found weak management structures in community care, with a considerable variation in the range and types of duties carried out by doctors. It also found minimal contact between doctors working in community care and those working in public health departments within the same health boards.
Calling for immediate action to resolve the disease-control situation, the report identified some disease outbreaks which went unreported for several days, due in part to the lack of an "out of hours" disease-control service.