Senior managers in the state health service should be statutorily obliged to undergo a career quarantine before taking up lucrative jobs in the commercial health sector, Labour Party spokeswoman Jan O'Sullivan has urged.

As the privatisation of citizens' healthcare gains pace, she is calling for the enforced "garden leave" applicable to higher civil servants to be expanded to cover public servants in the HSE. Her call was prompted by the transfer of a number of highly placed executives in the public service to companies blazing the privatisation trail.

One of the highest-profile HSE executives to jump the public sector ship is Dr Sean McGuire who was a member of Prof Brendan Drumm's original four-person kitchen cabinet. Having co-founded Britain's first major out-of-hours GP co-op, Medway Doctors, in 1989, he returned to Ireland and set up Caredoc in Carlow in 1999.

He was involved in setting up South Doc in 2001 and Shannon Doc in 2002. He was hired as a HSE consultant in 2005, advising Drumm on primary care, and was paid €250,000 for 15 months' service. In 2007, he joined Touchstone Healthcare, founded by Carr Communications chairman Fergus Hoban, who sold his Unicare chain of pharmacies to German pharmaceutical giant Gehe for €127.6m.

Touchstone is building a €500m chain of 60 healthcare centres revolving around GPs' clinics. The doctors will not be employed by Touchstone. Rather, they will buy the premises to house their clinics. Touchstone, however, will operate the onsite retail pharmacies at the centres.

"It's a serious matter of public interest," O'Sullivan said. "First of all, there is an issue of people going to work in the commercial sector being able to use information they've got while working in the public sector, straightaway after leaving. Secondly, you're talking about a large amount of money being transferred into the commercial sector as the public system is buying services from the commercial sector."

Under the code of behaviour for civil servants, senior staff intending to switch to jobs in the private sector are required to take a year's career break to avoid a conflict of interest. "The HSE should be treated the same way," O'Sullivan says.

Among the directors of the Charter Medical Centre in Smithfield, Dublin, is the chief executive of the Irish Payments Services Organisation, Pat McLoughlin, another of Drumm's former righthand men. McLoughlin quit as the director of the National Hospitals Office and deputy chief executive of the HSE in January 2006 after a reported disagreement with the Department of Finance about his pension entitlements.

After 28 years in the public health sector, he set up his own health consultancy in 2006 with clients in the private and the public sectors.

Another former health board boss and recent chief executive of the HSE in the northwest, Pat Harvey, is now a director of Northwest Health­care which is building a €60m hospital close to Letterkenny General Hospital. In a region where the lack of radiation services has been a long-running controversy and where some women have chosen mastectomy to avoid arduous journeys to Dublin for treatment, the planned hospital will provide oncology services for public and private patients.

"When good people with strong management experience leave the health service, the public sector is the less for it," said former Irish Medical Organisation president Dr Christine O'Malley. "But it's particularly disturbing when they leave for jobs in the private health sector having been privy to information and the planned strat­egies of the HSE."