Annie Hoey (Labour) | Oireachtas source

I thank the witnesses for their presentations. We discussed these questions before when the witnesses were here previously so forgive me for being a broken record on these topics. The witnesses mentioned a global shortage of doctors. Are we training enough doctors in Ireland? Is there global capacity to meet the medical needs of the world? I suppose it is an esoteric question but if there is a global shortage of doctors and we have a shortage of doctors, are we simply not training enough doctors globally or is it just that doctors are being moved from one place to the other and we are taking from Peter to pay Paul? We previously discussed how we recruit doctors from certain countries to work in Ireland and the impact of this brain drain on those countries.

In their opening statements, the witnesses spoke about doctors who cannot progress to consultant level. These are doctors who are six years on a critical skills permit.

We desperately need these doctors. Can the witnesses outline some of the countries these doctors are from? I am still boggled by the fact that we have doctors who we would say are skilled enough to be non-consultant hospital doctors and who may be working in the system for a number of years, but we will not allow them progress on. Are the witnesses aware of any plans to try to deal with that? It was said that 6,000 consultants are required. There are 9,000 non-consultant hospital doctors, of which posts 80% are filled by international doctors. I am not terribly au fait with maths but it seems that the numbers do not really add up and there possibly is a way we could fill some of that gap but perhaps I am wrong on that.

Finally, I can go digging around on this but are there figures available on how many surgeries or procedures are cancelled on the day because of a lack of equipment? I will give a specific example of someone who was being wheeled down to surgery, they were in the gown and all the bits and pieces, they had done their paperwork and many people had been involved. As they were being wheeled into surgery, they were told that the metal was not in place to fix their foot. The whole thing was cancelled and they had to come back into the system again. That obviously has a huge cost and a huge delay. Do the witnesses have any idea of the number of times that is happening and the cost of it to our healthcare system?

Those are my three questions.