Madam, - The recommendation by Prof Patrick Fottrell's working group that the number of medical students being trained in this country should be more than doubled (The Irish Times, June 12th) will be warmly welcomed by those in the health service who have despaired at the difficulty in recruiting junior doctors over the past few years and who have sometimes suspected the competence of those appointed.
So too will be the recognition that responsibility for these trends lies primarily with the civil servants and politicians who have insisted for decades on capping the number of doctors we produce while, at the same time, starving our medical schools of the funding to train our own citizens.
This political madness has fostered an equally absurd political correctness which has resulted in:
1. The complete absence of a "democratic demography" among our medical graduates (i.e., Irish doctors as a group should reflect the overall population, but in fact just one in six of our graduates is an Irish male, for starters).
2. A still-declining retention rate among these precious graduates. Far too many are opting out of full-time careers to pursue "work-life-balance", while many Irish teenagers who might stay the course are denied access to medical school by our fatuous points system.
Much concern has been expressed at the shortage of beds and other resources in our creaking health service. In fact, we should be just as worried by the shortage of home-grown doctors in Ireland, our strategically disastrous reliance on the international medical manpower market, and the failure to recruit medical students willing to become the round-the-clock doctors that our citizens desperately need. - Yours, etc,
Dr CHRIS LUKE,
Director of Postgraduate
Medical Education,
Cork University Hospital.
Cork.