Persuading top Irish doctors to return home increasingly difficult, says UCD medical dean

THE DEPARTING head of UCD’s medical school has said he has found it extremely difficult to recruit top-class doctors to return to Ireland because we do not have education or health systems that function properly.

Prof Bill Powderly, himself a UCD graduate, will leave his post in January. The infectious diseases expert has been recruited to head up a global health initiative at Washington University, St Louis, Missouri.

“I think there is a lack of recognition at a senior level in Government of the wide-ranging jobs that senior academics do,” he told The Irish Times last night. “And the Health Service Executive doesn’t understand education and research or care about it.”

As a result, it is “extremely difficult” to recruit people to come back to academic posts in the Republic “who know what is going on”, he said. Asked to expand on this he said it was hard to get things done in an environment where change management is not a consultative process.

Prof Powderly emphasised his decision to leave after eight years at UCD was for a mixture of personal and professional reasons. He had worked in the US for 21 years prior to his appointment as head of the UCD medical school and as a consultant in infectious diseases at Dublin’s Mater hospital.

He is the second senior medical academic to leave Ireland in six months; Prof Dermot Kelleher departed as dean of medicine at Trinity College Dublin to go to Imperial College London in June.

Prof Powderly said we were coming to the end of a golden era for Irish medicine and Irish universities. It wasn’t just the recently announced salary cuts for newly recruited consultants that would affect Ireland’s ability to attract international talent but the overall message that we are no longer serious about academic medicine.

He said the move to a graduate entry system for medical school had been a success, but warned that it was difficult for graduate entrants to secure bank loans to complete their medical studies.