Mr. Jimmy Quinn:

As Mr. Moriarty stated, there is clear evidence on the medical side that how students are trained and the practice placements they are exposed to has a big influence on the eventual outcome. Therefore if students from rural areas tend to be selected and exposed to front-line rural practice, there is a higher likelihood of them going back to work in rural communities. What attracted us to UL initially was that we wanted to study the graduate medical programme as it was quite innovative and the outcomes were different from many of the other medical courses. As Mr. Moriarty said, 40% of UL's graduates go into general practice as opposed to the national average of approximately 20%. On the veterinary side, we also see the need to get multi-competent first-line clinicians who will be capable of going into the predominant practice type, that is mixed practice. They need to be competent across all the species, at least initially. If they want to specialise subsequently, that is also fine. There is also an issue arising at the moment that practice owners and employers are finding graduates will not work in certain areas. They choose not to do cattle work or equine work or not to do out-of-hours obstetric calls for large animals. That is causing considerable difficulties in running practice rotas because it puts an uneven share of the work, usually on the practice owner.