Dr. John Farrell:

I agree with Dr. Quinlan that we need more GP intern places. With the numbers of graduates, however, not all of them will go into general practice. We need greater exposure of general practice in the medical schools. This is something we are going to try to address with the individual universities.

On the Senator's point about starting up in practice, if people do not have access to the GMS list, it is extremely difficult to start up in practice without any patient load. Financially, it is just not viable. As my colleagues from the IMO said, we need to find ways of encouraging people to start up in practice to ensure we have GPs throughout the country to address healthcare needs, particularly among our ageing population which has been the difficulty of late.