The Department of Health does not value or understand the work done by public health specialists, a meeting of public health doctors has been told.
Addressing striking doctors on Saturday after the unprecedented threat made by the Minister for Health against nine senior public health specialists, the CEO of the Irish Medical Organisation, Mr George McNeice, said health service managers do not appreciate "the amount of trouble you get them out of every day".
He told the well-attended meeting that "the Minister for Health and his advisers lost the plot yesterday".
Dr Joe Barry, newly-elected president, told his fellow public health specialists that an examination of the political careers of Mr Michael Noonan, Mr Brendan Howlin and the present Minister, Mr Martin, showed where the real problem in the health service lies.
Dr Neville De Souza, a public health specialist with the South Eastern Health Board, said "the Minister for Health needs to take a good look at himself in the mirror". He told The Irish Times that Mr Martin might then see the reflection of a man who has over- reacted to the sustained stress of his job.
Dr Fenton Howell, one of the doctors threatened by Mr Martin, called on the ICTU to examine the speech given by the Minister at the IMO annual meeting on Friday. "The threats he issued should be appalling to every trade union in the country".
Questioning whether such action was acceptable to the National Implementation Body set up under the recent partnership agreement, he said: "Every trade unionist in the country must respond to the Minister for Health by saying - you cannot behave like that."
A specialist in public health medicine in the North Eastern Health Board, Dr Declan Bedford, contrasted the Minister's "bullying" behaviour with that of striking doctors who had welcomed the Minister to the conference. "Guests should not insult their hosts," he said.
There were also a number of references to a growing split between the striking public health doctors and their fellow specialists who work as medical officers in the Department of Health. One doctor suggested that the management skills of striking public health doctors were "clearly needed at the highest level in the Department of Health". Dr Barry noted that there had been a number of "gross blunders regarding SARS".