Dr. Laura Durcan:

From speaking to colleagues who work in UHL, the medical call in UHL is extremely challenging in particular. As the Deputy says, there are people who will have 100 patients on their bed on a Monday morning at their ward round having done a whole weekend, and that sounds horrendous.

On the geographical challenges in Ireland, if we look to the past, there have always been people who have wanted to staff the regional hospitals. The fall in staffing in the regional hospitals has been very recent. It is really only since 2012 that we have seen that there are no applicants for those jobs. There were gastroenterology jobs in University Hospital Waterford that had ten or 12 applicants in the past. If a gastroenterologist job in University Hospital Waterford were to be advertised now, it would be a good result if one suitable applicant came forward to fill it. The same can be said for all the other hospitals. There have always been people who have wanted to be county physicians and there have always been people who have wanted to be down the country for many different reasons. Historically, there have not been specific geography challenges, but now there are hospital challenges whereby people are slow to come home for a different salary and, equally, they are slow to come home to a hospital that is almost entirely staffed by locums. They do not want to work there.