Doctors at the IMO annual meeting have rejected a proposal to create a majority lay membership on the Medical Council.
A motion expressing concern at a proposal by Minister for Health Mary Harney to introduce a majority lay membership on the doctors' regulatory body was carried unanimously, while a second was referred to the IMO council.
Dr Hugh Bredin, a consultant urologist at University College Hospital, Galway, and a current member of the Medical Council, said: "If the Minister for Health wants a lay majority on the Medical Council it will undermine the profession, which will no longer be in control of the council.
"Doctors will be under threat from a body that no longer represents them."
Emphasising that he was not speaking on behalf of the Medical Council, he said he was unaware of any other country that had a lay majority on its medical regulatory body.
"If a majority [on the council] are lay members then we are no longer an independent profession from a regulatory point of view."
Dr Illona Duffy, a Monaghan GP, said while she realised people had concerns, especially following the Lourdes hospital inquiry, she was not in favour of a non-medical majority on the council.
Pointing out that the Medical Council had a number of roles apart from disciplining doctors, she said: "To do all of that you have to be involved with clinical aspects of medicine. For that reason we cannot have a lay majority."
Dr Gary Stack, a Killarney GP, said: "While I welcome more lay involvement with the Medical Council, I feel a lay majority is unhealthy for both patients and doctors."
Earlier, Seán Power, Minister of State for Health, told the meeting that work on a new Medical Practitioners' Bill was advanced and its heads would be available in the coming months.
He said the new legislation would integrate registration, education and training, competence and fitness-to-practise processes
"It will introduce more streamlined and transparent processes for the processing of complaints and provide for the first time a legal framework for the Medical Council's implementation and administration of competence assurance."
Dr Joe Barry, a public health specialist, called on the HSE to provide a comprehensive healthcare service for immigrants.
He said it was good the HSE could repatriate dead people, but it needed a much more generous response to the people who were actually living here and contributing to the country.
Several hospital consultant members of the IMO castigated the Government for continuing to increase the amount of money given each year to the National Treatment Purchase Fund (NTPF). Its funding this year is €80 million.
Dr Seán Tierney said spending on the purchase fund was growing faster than any other healthcare spending sector in the State. He said it cost far more per year to run the NTPF than it did to run many of our smaller public hospitals, most of which catered for far more patients.
The NTPF dismissed an allegation made at the conference on Thursday that a patient who was sent to the UK for treatment under the fund ended up deaf in one ear. It said it had no knowledge of such a case.
However, Dr Tony Healy, who raised the issue, said he stood over his remarks, and said he had communicated his concerns to an official who worked with the NTPF.