The Health Service Executive (HSE) is to carry out a comprehensive review of the number of administrative staff it employs.
In a letter to the trade union Impact this week, HSE chief executive Prof Brendan Drumm said it would commission human resource experts to assess the level of clerical, managerial and administrative personnel in the organisation.
He said there would also be a "bottom-up" analysis of where people were working in the HSE, their current roles and their reporting relationships.
He accepted, because of the sheer scale of changes in the health sector over the past 2½ years, that "there are some people who feel that their roles are no longer as meaningful as previously".
Prof Drumm said one of the regular criticisms levelled at the HSE was that it had too many administrative staff.
He said the human resource consultants would assess the level of clerical, administrative and managerial staff in the HSE against international standards.
They would also "provide guidance on what the standards are for hospital systems and primary and community care".
"The experts will also develop a model that can be used for assessing the appropriate level of staffing for any business unit, allowing for all variables that may exist."
Prof Drumm said the review would also develop proposals for each of the former health board headquarters around the country "because we are aware that this is an issue which has not been fully addressed".
The HSE hoped the review could be carried out "in a partnership way" and it would be endorsed by unions such as Impact which represented many administrative and managerial staff.
Speaking at Impact's biennial health and welfare conference in Portlaoise yesterday, the union's national secretary, Kevin Callinan, welcomed what he said was the HSE's new approach to health service reform.
He told delegates they had "absolutely nothing to fear" from the proposed review. It could dispel the myth that there were too many administrators in the health service.
