Dr. John Farrell:

As to what the Deputy said about practices being busy, 90% of practices have reported that they are busier now than they were before Covid. There is a pent up demand there because there was lots of telemedicine and telephone consultations during Covid and people want to be seen, want to meet their GP and want to discuss their health issues. We have seen 90% of practices now reporting increased workload levels. The opposite side of that is that 40% of GPs could not take annual or sick leave in the past 12 months. That is a huge amount of leave. As for incentivising people to go into rural practice or general practice anywhere, if people could not take time out because of sickness or to get an operation done or whatever the case might be, that is a disincentive. Those are the areas we need to address.