Dr. Colm Henry:

I thank the Deputy. I want to acknowledge the huge role that interns and junior doctors have played in the pandemic. In the three surges in the past year, they were true front-line workers and they contributed hugely to our response in the hospital system. Interns are trainee doctors in the sense they have got their medical degree and they complete this year under the supervision of a network of medical schools in the hospital system with a designated trainer before they get full registration when they qualify and then go on to training schemes, be it in general practice or in hospitals. We cannot look at the numbers of interns we create in isolation. We are moving from a system where we know we have too many non-training hospital doctors. We want to move to a system where we have training opportunities for these interns so that the numbers who come through the intern year could then access what is basic specialty training, BST, then higher specialist training and then, in good manpower planning, can progress in their careers to become either general practitioners, public health or hospital-based consultants. In looking at the number, it is not just a question of dealing in isolation with what is right or good for one group of a workforce alone. It is how it integrates with other training requirements as they go on.

As I say, we are reviewing the quality and the configuration of the existing intern posts affiliated to the six medical schools and part of this will be looking at the number and seeing if we can increase the number in line with increased training opportunities. On that point, last year we increased the number of training places, not only the intern places, in response to the crisis and we created additional fellowship posts to enable our trainees, not only interns or senior house officers, SHOs, as specialist registrars, to stay in Ireland beyond being an intern here. We created additional training posts in public health, general practice, anaesthesia and other critical core specialties in response to the crisis and, as I said, additional fellowship posts which allowed them to complete higher specialist training here too.