Local councillors will have up to six opportunities a year to meet the four regional bodies which are replacing health boards, it emerged yesterday.
While the reports underpinning the Government's health service reform programme, including Prospectus, Brennan and Hanly, spoke about the need to take politics out of healthcare, the Minister, Mr Martin, said yesterday that local councillors would continue to have an input.
But while the councillors will have an opportunity to express their opinions on how health services are run and to ask questions of health service administrators they will not have the powers they enjoyed as health board members when they could vote to accept or reject annual service plans for their area.
The announcement of the new role for local public representatives came at the publication of legislation which will underpin the new structures replacing health boards, to be abolished in January.
The Health (Amendment) Bill, 2004, is an interim piece of legislation which provides for the abolition of the membership of health boards.
It also provides for the functions currently carried out by health board members to be transferred to health board chief executives.
These functions include the adoption of service plans, the annual accounts and the annual reports.
Furthermore, it introduces a requirement for the consent of the Minister for Health to be obtained before property which has been owned by health boards can be disposed of or new property acquired.
Outlining details of the new Bill, which was agreed by Cabinet over a week ago, Mr Martin said in Killarney that county councils would nominate representatives to the new public representative panels.
Membership of these forums or panels would be confined to local councillors. He dismissed earlier suggestions that they would be made up of TDs and senators only.
The chairman of the Association of Health Boards, Mr Jack Bourke, said he was pleased with the announcement. The Prospectus report had said that the panels should be made up of Oireachtas members and, given that this was not now going to be the case, a sense of local democracy would be maintained, he said.
He added that while the councillors on the panels would not have statutory powers, he believed they would still be able to wield influence.
The boundaries for the four regional offices of the HSE have not yet been decided. Neither has the location of the head office, which is to be decentralised.