Dr. Diarmuid Quinlan:

I thank Mr. Moran. I will give a personal perspective on the GP out-of-hours issue. I am in Cork and work with Southdoc. Last Friday, I worked a full day in my surgery before starting work in Southdoc at 6 p.m. and working until 11 p.m. doing house calls and seeing patients. It was very busy. Our Southdoc commitment is on top of an already very busy workload. My rural colleagues have a very onerous out-of-hours rota, which again is a further disincentive to GPs choosing to work in rural areas.

The Senator asked about universities and training places. We are training a substantial number of medical students in Ireland. A new university medical college started in the North of Ireland this year. We have a substantial number of students but we do not have sufficient intern places for all of our graduates. I would like to see more GP intern places. That is the key time at which young doctors decide on their future career. I would like to see more GP intern places, followed by more GP training places or training posts in the various specialties in the hospitals. There is a major shortage, particularly in some specialties, of training posts in hospitals. This would also help my hospital colleagues in training their particular specialties. It would benefit the wider system but particularly general practice. We certainly need more GP intern places and more specialty hospital places which provide a pipeline into GP training.