Professor Brian O'Connell:

I mentioned training in the statement. It is certainly something for the reference group. It is contained in the policy. Obviously, if one wants to have a good and functioning primary care system, and one wants to have a good ecosystem, one needs to have people trained at primary care level - we have spoken a fair amount about that - but one also needs people with special skills who can treat the more complex patients and provide the training for the people on the ground to be able to see the widest number of patients possible, and those are the specialists and academics. Indeed, some of that has been hollowed out over the past ten, 15 or 20 years. When we had the then Postgraduate Medical and Dental Board, it was medical and dental and there was more attention given at that point to having a structured career through dentistry. That was disbanded when the HSE was set up and it feels like much of that responsibility for further training and dentistry in specialisation and in academic pathways seems to have dissipated. We have spent a lot of time over the past years trying to find it and we do not know where it has gone. Certainly, we need to put specialist training and consultant academic training back on a firmer footing and that is recognised in the policy.