Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Wednesday, 2 May 2018

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Health

Medical Council Specialist Register: Discussion

9:00 am

Dr. Tom Ryan:

There are good data in some of the OECD documents in Health at a Glance: Europe 2016 and Health at a Glance: Europe 2018.

They go into it in quite a level of detail and do quite complex mathematical analysis of the link between how long people live and healthcare spending, and there is quite complex regression analysis and a curve. We fall bang in line with how much we should be spending for the life expectancy of our population. If we consider in particular the improvement in people's lifespan during the past 20 years, we can see the benefits of all the money we have spent on healthcare.