Dr. Diarmuid Quinlan:

In my practice we have eight GPs working, about five and a half whole-time equivalents. The workforce plan suggests we should have 40% more doctors, so we really should have an extra three to four doctors serving the same population. If we could do that, we could see everyone who is sick on the day and that would very substantially remove a lot of the burden from the GP out-of-hours, but because we simply cannot resource and recruit sufficient GPs for daytime work, it pushes a lot of work into GP out-of hours. I would see the solution for the principal part of it as having a very substantial uplift in the number of GPs available, so if your child is sick you can see your usual GP in normal daytime working hours. I absolutely agree with Deputy Shortall's comment that people do not get sick just between 9.00 a.m. and 5.00 p.m. Monday to Friday.

The GPs work the majority of sessions in out-of-hours services, so if there were many more daytime GPs, certainly in SouthDoc, it would substantially alleviate the challenges. To my mind, everything comes back to the very severe GP workforce crisis.