Dr. Simon Walsh:

With regard to getting specialists home from a medical perspective, I have worked in Australia as a doctor for ten years. The quality of life there is much better, the services are much better and the system works much better. People do not leave work stressed or anxious about the stuff that has happened during the day and they are not attending meetings all the time to try to get things fixed. Their focus is patients and they are able to help patients.

The problem in regard to being with Zoe, with her special needs, was our being so far from family and with parents getting older, so we made the decision we were going to go back to a system that is less functional, and pay did not really come into it. It is about coming home to family and wanting to come home to a system that works. There are a lot of young people out there who do not have the same desire to get back to Ireland. However, we need to make a system that has a better work-life balance so people are not working every hour in the week, and where work is enjoyable because the place people are going into is not a building that is 150 years old and has not been painted. Little things like that make a workplace more attractive. In Galway, my office for two years was in a prefab and the whole department was essentially a prefab. I know they have funding in place to get a new department but that does not happen in Australia, where there are new hospitals. It is little things like that that make people happy to work in a place, and it is the same for all of those specialists and therapists. If they come back and they are stuck in a room with no windows for 40 hours a week, that is not as attractive as a situation where there are people to help with the job, and they are able to work together and have meetings to strategise about how to help these families and children. As Ms Walsh said, someone who is working half-time to see 800 kids cannot see them because those kids are on waiting lists and that does not work. There should be three or four physios. It is just about funding.