Up to 50,000 patients a week will be affected if planned nationwide industrial action by hospital consultants goes ahead from next month.
Consultant members of the Irish Medical Organisation (IMO) voted yesterday by a margin of 89 per cent to 11 per cent for industrial action in a dispute over medical malpractice cover.
Members of the country's other representative body for consultants, the Irish Hospital Consultants' Association (IHCA), are expected to support industrial action at a meeting tomorrow.
The IHCA is likely to ballot its members on industrial action over the coming weeks. The IMO and the IHCA are to hold talks on the nature and timing of the industrial action.
However, both organisations said last night that the action would more than likely see the cancellation of all outpatient consultations, day-case procedures and elective or non-urgent treatments carried out in hospitals.
A spokesman for the Minister for Health, Ms Harney, said last night that the planned industrial action by consultants was "not fair for patients".
The IMO's director of industrial relations, Mr Fintan Hourihan, said that about 50,000 patients a week could be affected if the dispute went ahead.
Mr Hourihan said that the industrial action, which would affect both public and private hospitals, could get under way from the beginning to the middle of March.
The secretary general of the Irish Hospital Consultants' Association, Mr Finbar Fitzpatrick, last night told The Irish Times that some 40,000 outpatient appointments in hospitals as well as 7,000 day-case procedures and 3,000 to 4,000 elective treatments were carried out on patients every week.
He said the vast majority of these would be cancelled if the dispute went ahead. The dispute essentially centres on who should pay for the cost of historic medical negligence cases against consultants - particularly obstetricians - which pre-dated the introduction of a State indemnity scheme for senior hospital doctors last year.
The UK-based medical indemnity organisation, the Medical Defence Union (MDU), has said it does not have the resources to cover these claims, which have yet to come before the courts, even though it accepted subscriptions from the doctors over the years.
The MDU has argued that the State should meet the bill, which Government advisers have estimated could reach €400 million. The MDU has so far refused to provide assistance to around 25 consultants.
The hospital consultants are seeking a legal guarantee that no doctor will be left having personally to pay for damages arising from a medical negligence case.
In a separate development, the MDU yesterday terminated talks with the Department of Health aimed at providing a resolution to the dispute in protest at critical remarks made by Ms Harney at an Oireachtas committee hearing on Thursday.
These talks had centred on how a due-diligence process would be carried out to assess how much the medical indemnity body could pay.
However, the MDU yesterday broke off the talks and said Ms Harney's comments left it with "little hope that the problem can be resolved by negotiation".
Ms Harney told the Oireachtas Committee on Health and Children that the MDU had "behaved disgracefully" and had "betrayed" Irish doctors and patients. She said that she was not going to allow the MDU to walk away.
However, in its letter to the Minister yesterday the body said: "Your comments about the MDU suggest to us an absence of any palpable intent to reach a resolution with the MDU."
