Hospital consultants will meet on Saturday to consider their attitude to settlement proposals in the nurses' dispute.
Accident and Emergency nurses vote today on whether to end their work to rule in A&E departments.
The work to rule has meant the cancellation of planned admissions in many hospitals.
The Irish Nurses' Organisation and SIPTU are recommending the proposals agreed at the Labour Relations Commission.
They include the establishment of local committees to work out policies on the admission and discharge of patients.
The committees, made up of managers, nurses and doctors, have four weeks to work out an "emergency response/escalation mechanism" to deal with surges in demand for beds through A&E departments.
This mechanism could include extra ward rounds - to see if patients are ready to go home - and cancellation of planned admissions.
The Irish Hospital Consultants' Association has warned that it is consultants who have a contractual obligation to decide when a patient will be discharged and that this obligation cannot be replaced by a "formula". The issue will be discussed by the IHCA at its meeting on Saturday, assistant secretary general, Mr Donal Duffy, said.
Mr Duffy added that he understood, from exchanges at yesterday's A&E forum, that the nursing unions did not envisage a situation in which bed managers would discharge patients without consultation with doctors.
The forum was established by the Minister for Health and Children as an earlier response to the nurses' dispute and before the LRC became involved.
Representatives of unions, health service employers and patients met to exchange views on the issue and will meet again next month.
Mr Stephen McMahon, chair- man of the Irish Patients' Association, said that at last count there were at least 117 different forums looking at the health system. He favoured analysis and review but a time came when people would like to see the execution of their plans.
Dr Mick Molloy, president of the Irish Medical Organisation, said committees such as those proposed by the LRC already existed, at least in an informal way, in some hospitals. The proposals, if accepted by nurses, meant all hospitals with A&E departments would have them.
The main issue was that there were insufficient beds in the system and the local committees could not do anything about this.