Colm Burke (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister of State for attending to deal with this matter. I have raised this issue with regard to junior doctors consistently over the past four to five years.

In 2012, I conducted a survey of people doing their final medical examinations in Irish universities. It indicated that more than 60% of them did not intend to work in Ireland once they had finished their internship. A survey published in recent days indicates this number may very well have increased to 80%. While we have had various reports going back to 2003, including the MacCraith report and the second MacCraith report, which dealt with training for junior doctors, we do not seem to be making any progress.

I had to leave a meeting of the health committee with the Minister, Deputy Harris, to come here. The committee received a report on training and development in the HSE for the first six months of 2017, which showed we are underspending by approximately 36% on training and development. This concerns me because we want to retain junior doctors and we do not seem to be proactive in dealing with this. I made the point at the committee that the HSE has recruited more than 2,000 administrative and managerial staff in two years. We now have 17,000 managers and administrators in the HSE but, at the same time, we seem to have done nothing for the people working at the coal face, namely, junior doctors. We have a major problem with smaller hospitals, which are finding it extremely difficult to recruit senior house officers, registrars and senior registrars, particularly in places such as Letterkenny, Sligo, Castlebar, Clonmel, Waterford, Tralee and even Limerick. We need to address this issue, and it is for this reason I have tabled this question. We need major reform in how we provide for this category of personnel in the HSE at front-line level.