Stephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I thank Mr. Hourihan. We have time constraints and I want to pose a question to the team from the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland, RCSI. I thank them for their submission. It makes very stark reading. It essentially states that there is no supervised year of training, so a college graduate can go straight into private practice. I did engineering as my undergraduate degree. I am pretty sure nobody would have left me unsupervised to design, build and roll out anything. This lack of a supervised year of training is worrying. The lack of continuing professional development is deeply worrying as well.

I have two questions. Presuming all of this information has been submitted on numerous occasions to the HSE, the Department of Health and the office of the Minister, it is safe to state this is not the first airing for these concerns and policy recommendations. The concerns being raised seem to be reasonable and urgent. What has been State's response to date? If the recommendations of the RCSI dental faculty are not implemented and we proceed with the status quo, what are the implications for the oral health of patients?