Dr. Niamh Humphries:

On the Deputy's first point, after the pandemic all countries will seek to strengthen their medical workforces. Ireland needs to pay attention to that. Whether it is Australia, New Zealand, the UK or the US, all of them will looking to recruit more hospital doctors and we must make sure that we work harder to retain the hospital doctors we train, especially post Covid, because Ireland will need to strengthen its medical workforce as well.

In terms of how many emigrate to each country, I do not have that data available. At one stage I looked at the data for a number of different countries to see how many emigrated from Ireland relative to the number we trained and it was terrifying. Those figures were from 2014. It is one thing for me as a researcher to look for and gather that data, but the health system needs to be doing this. We need to know how many of the 750 doctors who graduate stay in Ireland, how many emigrate and, of those who emigrate, how many return. Until we have that data it is really just guesswork about presuming they will all return or will not all return. We need hard data to back that.

In 2018, I went to Australia to talk to 51 Irish-trained doctors who had left. Of those I interviewed, only 16 planned to return, and they planned to return for personal rather than professional reasons. It is important for us to be a little fearful of our widespread doctor emigration figures. Some 391 doctors last year leaving for Australia is a large number of doctors relative to the number we train. Not all of them plan to stay in Australia forever. Many of those I interviewed in Australia had not planned to stay there. They had emigrated with the intention of returning, but while they were in Australia opportunities came up, they enjoyed work and they enjoyed the work-life balance on offer there, so they decided to stay. We cannot just assume that those who leave will definitely return. We need to start taking emigration more seriously, especially post Covid, when there is going to be increasing competition for doctors from all the countries the Deputy listed.

Doctors who were trained in Ireland and who speak English are going to be in demand worldwide post-Covid.