An increasing number of hospital consultants would like to concentrate on treating public patients and be paid accordingly, according to the Irish Medical Organisation.
At present a consultant's pay for public work varies from £85,000 to approximately £100,000 a year depending on the health board region.
The lowest rate goes to consultants in Dublin on the assumption that a substantial amount of private work is available to them.
Consultants in other regions, such as the Western Health Board, get a higher rate on the basis that they have less of an opportunity for private work.
Increasingly, consultants are complaining that they are "penalised" by this system even if they don't want to do private work, according to the IMO.
At a recent strategy meeting of consultants there were calls for a salary rate for consultants who wanted to focus on public work which recognised that they were not supplementing their income with private work.
The IMO director of industrial relations, Mr Fintan Hourihan, said many new consultants were interested in concentrating on public work so as to be able to spend time with their families.
The IMO would support a special pay option for such cases under which the pay they received for public work would be higher than that received by those who were also doing private work.
It would be impossible for them to avoid doing any private work at all - for instance, a patient brought to hospital might insist on being treated on a private basis - but in this instance the fee could go towards research or could be used for the benefit of the hospital department in which the consultant worked.
Dublin, Kildare and Wicklow will need 190 specialised stroke beds over the next 10 years, according to the chief executive officer of the Eastern Regional Health Authority, Mr Donal O'Shea.
The specialist beds could reduce deaths from stroke by 25 per cent.
There are already 10 such beds in Tallaght, and the Mater plans to establish six specialised beds from December. St Vincent's established a stroke rehabilitation team 10 years ago.
"Our board has also taken a policy decision that full out-patient rehabilitation should be made available for all stroke patients discharged to the community and that community services should be developed to encompass the full interdisciplinary team," Mr O'Shea said yesterday
He said there were an estimated 30,000 people in the State who had residual disability as the result of a stroke.
Of these, almost half are partially paralysed, 22 per cent cannot walk, between 24 per cent and 53 per cent need help with daily living, between 12 per cent and 18 per cent have speech problems, 5 per cent have a residual swallow disorder, 32 per cent are clinically depressed and 33 per cent are impaired in their ability to think due to brain damage.
Mr O'Shea was speaking at the publication of a report by the Irish Heart Foundation's Council on Stroke.
The long-awaited National Health Strategy will be published by the Minister for Health tomorrow week, the Department confirmed last night.
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