Dr. Laura Durcan:

I have some personal experience of that. I graduated in Ireland and did my intern senior house officer, SHO, registrar training here. I did two fellowship training courses in the United States. In terms of the contracts I was offered at the end of my fellowship training in the US, ultimately, I took my job in Ireland but I was offered twice as much money in the United States. That was for academic, four days a week posts and the salary would have been considered less money than I would have got had I gone into private practice in the United States, which was not something that interested me.

One of the centres I worked in was the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, which is the number one centre in America. There are vast numbers of Irish graduates in the US, including friends of mine. When I went to Baltimore it was a big community of about 20 attending physicians or consultant equivalents and of those, I am the only person who has uprooted to come home. The general consensus among them would be that I was mad to consider leaving. These are people who are publishing in the The New England Journal of Medicineand developing medicine in an amazing way. They are incredibly clever and engaged and we have lost them; they are gone. Unless the position improves here they will not come back, and they would be an amazing asset to our health service. It makes me sad that they will not come back here unless the terms and conditions we work in improve.