Dr. Mick Molloy:

I will give an example. I went to Australia two years ago for a conference and made a point of going to a particular hospital in Perth to meet some medical colleagues. We have 700 interns a year, which is the first year after coming out of medical school. In that particular year, 380 of the 700 left Ireland to go to Perth. They did not see their future working in the Irish health service. They saw there were better terms and conditions, lifestyle and work-life balance in Australia, and Australia has been a major beneficiary of our medical graduates for the past ten years. In fact, there are probably more medical graduates from Irish medical schools now working in Australia than there are in Ireland, such has been the volume of exports. That obviously stopped during Covid, but there are now a large number of people pooled up who are all trying to leave, which is going to lead to a big issue as to where we get the middling 30, 35 and 40-year-old group of doctors who we would see as being the future of our health service in the country, because they are not going to be here. They will be abroad getting family life and structures set up abroad, and it will make it very difficult to recruit them back.

If these are the people who are now being made to work excessive hours and not getting their rest breaks, and we are saying we want to try to recruit them back to the country, they will not have trust in that as an employer of choice because they have had a different service and a different experience overseas. We have to compete with that. We have to look at that and ask how we structure career prospects for these people. We are currently saying people are appointed to a job for two years but they are going to spend six months in Dublin, six months in Waterford, six months in Wexford and six months in Clonmel. How do people manage a family life like that? It is very difficult, yet that is what we are expecting people to do. On the other hand, if they go to Australia, they work in one city, one hospital, for five or ten years in a row.