A new statutory health agency, to be formally established on March 1st, could eventually employ up to 200 people at its headquarters in Tullamore, Co Offaly. The Health Boards Executive (HeBe) was set up under the terms of the Health (ERHA) Act 1999, to facilitate joint activities between health boards.
Setting up the executive's headquarters in Tullamore will involve relocating Department staff from Dublin. It comprises the chief executive officers of the seven regional health boards, three area health boards and the Eastern Regional Health Authority.
The CEO of the Midland Health Board since 1980, Mr Denis Doherty, will resign to take up a new post as director of HeBe. He said some of the Department of Health and Children's functions would be devolved to the health boards and assigned to the new executive.
He said the new agency would harness the experience of existing regional boards. It would also aim to ensure fairness of access to health services.
"In relation to medical cards, there should be a similar response in one part of the country as there is in another. Just as social welfare entitlement is consistent across the country, there is a need to make sure that there is that consistency across the health boards."
For the ambulance service, "there should be a broadly similar response time in Longford to Wexford or in Cork compared to Dublin. HeBe would be about whatever is necessary to bring about that sort of consistency of approach across the country."
Mr Doherty strongly advocates the value of regionalisation of health services. "I'm not sure that the number of boards is going to change. There seems to be a view that people have, at this stage, a familiarity with the boundaries of the boards.
"The advantage of that outweighs the advantage that might accrue from changing them. I think we would have to have very strong, compelling reasons to change away from that." HeBe will aim to break down insular approaches within health boards.
"There isn't an obvious reason for changing the number of boards. But that's not to say the catchment areas of hospitals shouldn't straddle a number of boards," he said and administrative boundaries "shouldn't impact in a negative way on people when they need a service".