Professor Anne Matthews:

On trying to scope out the benefits or potential benefits, people were talking about healthcare workforces being sucked one side of the Border and they might be going back the other side for other parts of the health system. Nobody wants that kind of scenario. Huge investment goes into training health professionals. There have been some collaborative arrangements North and South but quite few. It highlights the lack of capacity and workforce planning in both systems. There is a huge reliance on internationally trained nurses and midwives in the Republic, as members know. Each year, the amount of health professionals we are preparing for the workforce are, unfortunately, associated with emigration out of Ireland, and then we are trying to recruit in. We need to really focus on the shared problems and the big problems and whether there is potential for those to improve with collaboration. We keep coming back to it. Each system has very similar problems but also quite specific problems and we do not want everybody ending up feeling that things are getting more negative or even potentially getting worse for populations or healthcare workers within that system.