Health board chief executives have been receiving training on how they should answer questions put to them by journalists when two major reports on the restructuring of the health service are published next week.
The training has been provided by Promedia, a company part-owned by Late Late Show host Pat Kenny. Part of it involved the CEOs being put through mock interviews by RTÉ's news anchor Bryan Dobson.
Details of the training programme - and the fact that chief executives have been advised to release "good" local news stories when the reports are published - were outlined in yesterday's Sunday Business Post. These good news stories, according to an internal document, would include accounts of patients who have been provided with life-saving treatment.
The communications strategy was suggested to the CEO group by the ERHA's director of communications, Ms Maureen Browne. She said yesterday each health board would have been billed individually for their Promedia training. The Prospectus and Brennan reports are expected to go to Cabinet tomorrow week and be published the following day.
The Prospectus report will recommend the abolition of all health boards and their replacement with four regional executive bodies which will have greater professional and consumer representation at the expense of local political representatives.
It will also recommend that a new national hospitals' agency take responsibility for all hospitals in the Republic and that the Department of Health be slimmed down and focus exclusively on policy making.
The Brennan report, which examined value-for-money in the health service, has proposed that a new health service executive agency be established to tackle the "management vacuum" at the heart of the health system. It also wants all new hospital consultants to work exclusively in the public sector.
The communications strategy set out how CEOs should deal with criticism raised in the reports. "The Brennan report is very much an accountant's view of how to manage," was one of its suggested responses. The CEOs have also been advised to welcome the reports and say the number of health boards is not really an issue and that "there must be some method of managing these services at regional level, whether you call it a health board or some other name".