Dr. John Farrell:

One of my colleagues has a clinical post in a hospital but, as Dr. Quinlan said, we also need the flow in the other direction so that people understand what we do in general practice now in dealing with the complexity of care. There is not enough exposure at undergraduate or, indeed, postgraduate level to general practice in training and equipping our doctors. It has been shown and it was said earlier that if people have intern posts in general practices, they are more likely to pursue a career in general practice. There are only four or five posts in the country at the moment and the undergraduate exposure to general practice training is also pretty limited so we need to try to improve that.