Dr. Diarmuid Quinlan:

I am conscious of what Senator Hoey said about recruiting overseas doctors and that we need to be mindful that we do not impose a brain drain on low and middle income countries. The HSE has signed up to the WHO agreement on that. On recruiting GPs from overseas, the terms and conditions for coming here need to be attractive so we need to make it attractive for GPs to come. If they are attractive for overseas GPs they would be attractive for Irish GPs so we would need to address all the issues we have raised about the workforce and the workload capacity. In a nutshell, we need more GPs and GP nurses. We need the physical infrastructure, that is, the bricks and mortar, and we need the IT to support GPs to do their jobs.

On the out-of-hours service, I am on the Cork SouthDoc committee. General practice in Ireland delivers in excess of 1.3 million consultations per annum so it is extremely busy and we do a huge volume of work. I spoke to the manager of our local co-op in the past week in advance of this meeting. They identified the need for more GPs to support out-of-hours care so it is available across rural areas. We need more GPs and GP nurses to undertake appropriate activities within. It is essentially a manpower issue with the GP out-of-hours service as well.