Letters

Importing medical staff is not the answer

Exporting our graduates

Wed Jun 7 2023 - 00:09

Sir, – Most people agree with the Taoiseach and Tánaiste that Ireland needs a seven-day health service. How frontline staff are going to be recruited to achieve this is beyond imagination. They say they are going to negotiate with unions. With a maximum 48-hour working week and skills shortages, it is going to be very difficult across a wide range of professions from technicians to nurses and doctors.

Availability of qualified hospital consultants will be the greatest challenge. We are already short hundreds of hospital consultants and are qualifying only about 90 per annum to replace retirement and those leaving to go to work in private hospitals. This leaves little hope of increasing capacity.

At present Ireland has one of the lowest number of hospital consultants per capita and highest number of non-consultant hospital doctors in the EU, showing hospitals are heavily reliant on junior doctors. Most of these juniors are not on any particular specialist training schemes. Most are on standalone posts and are supplying cheap labour to our hospitals.

There is currently a massive shortage of training places for medical graduates to train and qualify as consultants, thereby causing mass export of young doctors. Increasing the number of medical graduates will only provide more for export unless full training is made available to qualify as consultants. It is soul destroying for young doctors not to be able to complete their full training in their own country.

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Irish hospitals are heavily reliant on importing foreign consultants and we need to look at the effect this is having on the health services in their countries.

Would it not be a better solution to train our own graduates to become consultants in our hospitals and not be exporting our graduates and importing consultants from countries that need them? – Yours, etc,

MARION DERMODY,

Newbridge,

Co Kildare.

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