THE Medical Council inquiry into complaints of professional misconduct against Dr Moira Woods, the Dublin doctor and campaigner on social issues, may be held in public.
The inquiry, believed to be scheduled for October, could be held in public if Dr Woods requests it.
Since April, the Medical Council's Fitness to Practise Committee has offered this option to doctors appearing before it. So far, none has taken up the option.
The Woods inquiry follows complaints by a group of parents who claim they were wrongly accused of child abuse in the late 1980s. They include a couple whose children were returned to them by the courts.
Dr Woods has denied the charges of professional misconduct and says she has been advised that they are unlikely to be upheld.
Dr Woods was the first director of the Sexual Assault Unit at the Rotunda Hospital in Dublin. Along with the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre, she played a key role in alerting the public to the existence and extent of child sexual abuse. In her role at the Rotunda, she was involved in providing evidence for health board investigations into suspected abuse.
In the early 1990s, the work she was doing with children was taken on by specialist units in the children's hospitals in Temple Street and Crumlin in Dublin and by St Finbarr's Hospital in Cork.
She has been on sabbatical for several months and could not be contacted yesterday for a comment on whether she would ask for the inquiry to be public.
While the inquiry is believed to be scheduled for mid-October, it is not uncommon for doctors appearing before the Fitness to Practise Committee to ask for an adjournment and it is normal for the committee to grant such requests.
The parents bringing the complaints are believed to be linked with the Accused Parents Aid Group which has recently changed its name to Vocal Ireland to mark its affiliation to a Washington-based organisation.
In the past, the group has accused social workers of abusing children by removing them from the family home and by the way in which they questioned them.
It has been pressing for prosecutions of social workers and directors of community care in the health boards for not reporting child-abuse cases to the Garda in the 1980s and early 1990s.
The group takes the view that health boards should not be allowed to intervene in families unless there is a sustainable criminal case against a parent.
The chairwoman of the Medical Council's Fitness to Practise Committee, Prof Patricia Casey, said yesterday she could neither reveal nor confirm the names of doctors appearing before the committee.
The option of having a case heard in public was being offered to doctors on foot of a French case in which it was later found that a doctor had been wrongly denied the opportunity to have a public hearing.
If a request was made for such a hearing, the committee would have to decide whether it would be fair to the patients in the particular case to do so.