Dr. Diarmuid Quinlan:

If I may address Senator Hoey's first question, providing general practice services across the country is a big challenge. Our proposal is multifaceted. We certainly need substantially more GPs, GP nurses, phlebotomists and healthcare assistants. We need to very substantially expand the GP multidisciplinary team. Clearly, we need premises with greater footprints to house those healthcare professionals. As Mr. Foy has referenced, we also need to look at how to encourage graduates of Irish medical schools to select general practice as their preferred career.

The international evidence is clear. If we want people to choose the specialty of general practice, they need to be exposed to general practice during their graduate training. In Ulster University 30% of the undergraduate training is delivered in general practice. We need to substantially resource our universities to develop a pipeline to deliver our graduates into Irish general practice.