A plan to conduct an audit of up to 1,000 doctors a year is to be unveiled today by the Medical Council.
The council's president, Dr John Hillery, said the exercise would reassure patients but also reassure doctors themselves that they were doing everything as they should be.
He said that during the reviews, which are being described as 360-degree audits, those conducting them would talk to those who worked with the doctor under review as well as the doctor him/herself. Other doctors as well as nurses and hospital chief executives and also patients would be consulted.
"We want people to volunteer for the 360-degree audit," he said.
Legislation is required to make such audits mandatory and it is expected a provision to make these audits mandatory will be included in the long-awaited new Medical Practitioners Act.
However, the legislation has been delayed as a result of staff at the Department of Health having to channel most of their energies into legislation governing the refund of monies illegally charged to nursing home patients.
"The legislation isn't coming but we feel we want to move on with this. We want the profession to engage with us voluntarily on it," Dr Hillery said.
"We believe most doctors are practising properly and are competent so they have nothing to be afraid of," he added.
He hopes the audits will begin this summer and will be repeated at regular intervals.
Dr Hillery stressed that all doctors on the register of medical specialists were already being monitored to ensure they were involved in continuing medical education.
And he said the Medical Council also planned to set up a committee that would review concerns expressed to the council which never progressed to Fitness to Practice inquiry stage. This would ensure any emerging problems could be tackled early.
He also reiterated that doctors concerned about the activities of a colleague were ethically obliged to act. If their concerns could not be dealt with locally, they should report their concerns to the Medical Council, he said.
Meanwhile the council is to visit all five existing medical schools early next month. Dr Hillery said the purpose of these visits was to review progress since the council published reports on its previous visits to the schools in 2001 and 2003.
These found medical schools in the Republic were falling behind international standards, he said, due to lack of investment. It also drew attention to the fact that the schools were surviving only as a result of being able to obtain large fees from huge numbers of non-EU students.
The Fottrell group was set up to review medical education and training in the wake of the council's inspections and it has recommended the cap on the numbers of places for Irish and EU students be lifted and that the manner in which students are selected for medicine is changed, and that graduate entry programmes be established.
The Medical Council has already accredited the Royal College of Surgeons for a graduate entry programme and is assessing applications for accreditation from other universities. The reports on this latest round of inspections of medical schools, which take place on March 1st-3rd, would be published later in the spring, Dr Hillery said.
The Medical Council inspection teams will be accompanied by two external examiners including Prof Gordon Page of the University of British Columbia and Prof Maurice Savage of Queen's University, Belfast.