Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

Deputy Doherty is eating into my time; I may not be able to answer all the questions the Deputies asked. I am familiar with the NowDoc service, having spent an evening providing it when I did my undergraduate GP training in Carndonagh a long time ago. It is a very good service. It is important to bear in mind that GPs are a scarce resource and their time must be used efficiently. It does not make sense to have a GP up all night seeing one or two patients when the next day there is no one to see the 12 or 15 patients he or she would have seen had he or she been rostered during the day instead.

It is particularly difficult to get actual qualified GPs, vocationally trained GPs, to cover the red-eye shift. What happens instead all over the country is that people who are not fully qualified GPs, who are other types of doctor, fill in at night time and that is a quality issue as well which needs to be borne in mind. It is better to have one or two properly qualified GPs providing a service than to have three who are not actually GPs but are doctors without a general practitioner qualification. Of course this is ultimately a local matter and has to be resolved by agreement of KDOC, the GPs in Donegal and the HSE locally. It is not a decision that is subject to ministerial approval, sign-off or a veto.

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