The Irish Hospital Consultants Association will today call on the Health Minister to set the date for talks to begin on resolving the consultant recruitment and retention crisis.
There are currently more than 500 permanent consultant posts either empty or only temporarily filled across health services here.
Figures released late last week show the numbers of patients waiting to see a hospital consultant now stands at over 565-thousand.
Vice President of the IHCA, Laura Durcan, warns that the situation will continue to worsen unless the Government takes action.
She said: "The truth of the matter is it will continue to get worse and worse until we look at a situation where we're staffing the team.
"At the moment we have less than 40% of what we should have in terms of our consultant staffing numbers, and one-fifth of our posts are unfilled.
"We will continue to see this exponential increase in people added to our waiting list while we have an understaffed team."
