Róisín Shortall (Dublin North West, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

All right. I want to talk about GPs for a moment. They are key people in the refocusing on bringing services into the community and I am concerned about the number of training places. I got a reply to a parliamentary question recently that showed that this year, for example, there were 964 eligible applicants for the GP training programme but only 286 of those were taken in. As of September only 146 remain in the training places. That shows only 15% of those qualified to go into training places are actually in them. In the context of a serious shortage of GPs, what are we doing about prioritising an increase in the number of GP training places? It is way off the potential that is there.