Dr. Brendan O'Shea:

It is a numbers game. Some of them are leaving. These are established GPs, tough resilient people like us, who are saying goodbye to it. That is beginning to happen. That is part of our 2015 crisis, but largely it is a numbers game. We need to move from having 3,900 GPs and 1,700 part-time practice nurses, arguably towards having 5,000 and 5,000 full-time, respectively. Thereafter, if we get modest amounts of money, we will be able to do the blood tests. Anything that one wants done will be done at a fraction of the price in general practice. It simply cannot be done for nothing.

With respect to why GPs are not going into primary care centres, arguably, there are not enough of them. A question was asked as to why we are not going to primary care team meetings, which are important.