Dr. Niamh Humphries:

The medical workforce is heavily focused on temporary employees. This is not the norm in other countries. I do not have the figures from other countries to hand. We have a situation where we have many more non-consultant hospital doctors than we have consultants. It is out of line with what we set out to do in the Irish health system in 2003 with the Hanly report. We are striving for a consultant-delivered service. We do not have this. Many of the problems in the system stem from this. We have a very junior workforce. They are all on very short-term contracts. I cannot think of a company that would run on temporary staff. That is what we have. We have a huge number of non-consultant hospital doctors on very short-term contracts and they are highly mobile geographically. It is not how the system would be run if we were to design it from scratch. We would have many more senior decision makers relative to the number of junior doctors. Even in terms of the numbers of trainees per consultant, we have too few consultants and perhaps too many non-consultant hospital doctors relative to the number of consultants in the workforce.