Ms Susan Clyne:

There is no workforce planning. Obviously, workforce planning would take all of these things into account. Anybody who wants to be a doctor has to start thinking about it at a very young age. He or she is asked to get a huge number of points in the leaving certificate and must then do the health professions admission test, HPAT, and go into the very long university and training period. We see more diversity in medicine. Obviously, we see more women in medicine. We see through the graduate entry medical programme that people with previous degrees as their primary degree are coming into medicine.

One of the issues we have is the number of training places. We have a reliance on international doctors who work mainly within our acute system and are not on training pathways and whose visa regulations and critical skills are not dealt with very quickly. While they can go on to apply for training pathways, if the training pathway number is not increased, all we are doing is having more people apply for a static number of posts. We talk about needing "X" number of GPs and consultants in the future and these retirements happening over five years or even ten years. We talked about this a decade ago. We have the problem now. What we are saying is that we really have to do something about it now. It takes a very long time to train a doctor so we need the training places to be increased. We need our international doctors to be valued, to be able to see a future within Ireland and to be respected and treated appropriately and equitably within the system.