Dr. Diarmuid Quinlan:

I have some skin in the game because three of my sons are in college. It would be challenging to say that medical graduates alone should be compelled to remain in the country when this would not hold for any other graduate. There would be an issue with equity. However, we all know that in Australia, graduates pay for their education through supported loans. That is a larger conversation that we might have with the educational institutions. I know University College Cork, which is my own university, has a substantial number of non-EU medical students, who pay well north of €40,000 per year for their education and this subsidises the education of Irish and European medical graduates substantially. The funding of undergraduate medical education is a complex issue. Compelling graduates to work in a system that is very challenging might have the unintended consequence of dissuading people from choosing medicine in the first place.

Regarding the Deputy's second point about how many doctors we need to replace a whole-time equivalent, increasingly male and female graduates are looking at family-friendly options and this would include shared GMS contracts. We also need to look at their career objectives. Increasingly, our doctors want to do part-time clinical work, part-time research and part-time medical education. Increasingly, our younger and older doctors are choosing to work a blended or portfolio career where they have all of those issues. The evidence is that this helps prevent burnout. To answer the Deputy's question, one person entering GP training and working solely in general practice is increasingly less likely to be the case in the future so we need to plan for substantially more GPs, which is why we gave the figures earlier. Dr. Farrell might allude to the figures again.