Dr. Diarmuid Quinlan:

We train among the highest numbers of doctors in this country, per head of population, in Europe, and yet we do not enable a lot of them to remain in our country. We have a big shortage of intern places. If we want more doctors, then a very easy win would be to increase the number of intern places. We force many doctors who are not EU graduates to leave our medical schools and go abroad for their internships. I am thinking particularly of Canadian medical students who train here and then many of them are unable to secure an intern place. As a result, they go back overseas. Then a year or two later we are scouring the globe, looking for doctors, having forced our graduates to emigrate.