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

I thank the Deputy for raising this important issue. I know Deputy Cairns raised it yesterday as well. I do not want to comment directly on Dr. Fiona Kelly or Castletownbere, but I will certainly make sure that somebody, either from my office or that of the Minister for Health, Deputy Stephen Donnelly, reaches out to her to hear what she has to say.

I do know something about general practice. I am a trained, qualified GP. I worked in the public health service for seven years, including three years in general practice. My dad was a GP. I grew up over the shop. It was a traditional, single-handed general practice. My mum was the practice nurse, manager, accountant and secretary. Patients came to the extension of our house. That is where patients were seen. For a very long time, my dad got up every single night to do house calls. Every single night the phone would go off at 2 a.m. or 3 a.m. and he would go out and do house calls. I remember how hard it was, even back then in the 1980s, to get a locum to fill in, for example, for a week’s holiday or even so he could attend my communion and confirmation. It was hard back then and the truth is that general practice has changed.

GPs of my age and younger GPs are not willing to work that way any more and they should not. They want to work in teams where there is cross-cover and where they can be guaranteed things like the holidays and breaks they deserve. That makes it harder, therefore, to maintain single-handed practices, whether this is in urban or rural areas. That is a real issue that we need to be honest about and face up to. Even where locums are available, they tend to want to go into group practices, where there are two or three other doctors who know where things are and how the building works, rather than going in on their own to a single-handed practice where there is nobody to guide them. That is the reality and is something we have to face. It will be very hard to get doctors to work in single-handed situations in the future. That is why it is important and necessary that we move towards primary care centres and group practices, notwithstanding the difficulties that creates when people will have to travel a little further, or a lot further in some cases, to see their GP.

However, some of what the Deputy said is misinformation. We have more GPs in Ireland than ever was the case before. Do not believe me; ask the Irish Medical Council, which is an independent body. It is not elected by or controlled by the Government. It will tell you that we have more doctors who are registered as GPs in Ireland than ever was the case before. The HSE has more contracts with individual GPs than ever was the case before. Yes, we need them, because we have a rising population and an ageing population. We will need more. We have trebled the number of GPs being trained every year to make sure that is the case. However, it is simply misinformation to say the kind of things that the Deputy said there-----

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