The Medical Council has blamed the Government for failing to introduce legislative change which would enable it conduct quicker inquiries into complaints against doctors.
The council's president, Dr Gerard Bury, said yesterday the council had been seeking changes which would make the process "safe, effective and efficient" since 1980.
At present, investigations by the council's Fitness to Practise Committee can take years because its members sit for just 65 days a year. They also have other jobs.
Dr Bury told the joint Oireachtas Committee on Health and Children: "With the tools we have we are doing the best we can.We have engaged with the Department of Health very forcefully over the last five years, and have put very specific strategic proposals to it but we have no sense of when it will come to any fruition."
The proposals for change do not just include improving the current system. "I think there are other models within which changes can be rolled out. A single monolythinical process is inappropriate. This is what we have at present. As a result we have a sledgehammer approach to cases, whether they are serious or very minor."
If the proposals were taken on board "we think the public would be a damn sight better served than at present".
Dr Bury was responding to Labour's health spokesperson, Ms Liz McManus, who said there had been occasions when public confidence in the council had been dented.
Dr Bury went on to voice concerns about a proposed EU directive which would allow doctors from other member-states to practise in Ireland for 16 weeks every year without registration and, therefore, without supervision.
He said this would expose the public to significant risk, adding that the doctors from abroad would only be bound, in the event of a complaint, by standards in their own countries, which varied widely.
Research had shown that it was not an offence for a GP in one EU member-state to fail to attend to a call from a mother whose three-year-old child had a high temperature, rash and severe headache. Most people in the Republic would take a grave view of such behaviour, he said.
Furthermore, Dr Bury said the proposal would involve the amalgamation of 15 current EU directives regulating professions ranging from engineering to hairdressing and including medicine.