Ireland near bottom of OECD league for numbers of doctors

THE number of doctors per head of population in Ireland is among the lowest in the world, according to a new HSE report.

The Department of Health’s Health In Ireland Key Trends 2018 report has revealed that the country has fewer than three doctors per 1,000 people, ranking in 22nd place out of the 30 OECD countries surveyed.

The availability of doctors fell below the OECD average of almost 3.5 doctors per 1,000 people, according to the figures obtained as part of an OECD review in 2016.

Austria topped the poll with more than five doctors per 1,000 followed by Norway and Lithuania while Korea came last with just over two doctors for every 1,000 people living there.

The only countries that ranked lower than Ireland were Luxembourg, the UK, the US, Canada Japan, Poland, Mexico and Korea.

According to the report, there are currently 9,602 consultants and non-consultant hospital doctors – or junior doctors – working in the public health service as of September this year.

Of the available consultants, the majority worked in medicine (25.8%) followed by surgery (17.3%) and anaesthesia (12.7%) with just 3.1% of the senior medics engaged in emergency medicine.

However, there has been a 33.7% increase in the number of consultant and junior doctors since 2009 when the total number of public hospital doctors came to 7,180. Stephen McMahon of the Irish Patients’ Association said that more medical school places must be made available to combat the shortage of medical professionals.

‘The entry to medical schools in Ireland is very restricted and people nearly need to be super brains to actually get into med school when they don’t really need that level of qualification,’ he said. ‘Some doctors retiring now would be saying that if they were trying to get into medical school today they wouldn’t because of the educational requirements to get in.’

Mr McMahon also stressed that more needed to be done to ensure that doctors who trained in Ireland continued to serve the population. He said that it was unfair that some medical students were training here before deciding to ‘fly the roost’ after the taxpayer had ‘paid and invested in that doctor’s career’.

‘We hear anecdotally that they are very well remunerated when compared to other areas of the world,’ he added.

Mr McMahon warned that the situation was likely to worsen in future years in certain areas, including in primary care as older doctors began to retire, coupled with the low intake of new medics.

He said that as the ‘holy grail’ at the moment was dealing with ED overcrowding, what was needed was the expansion of primary care in community primary care practices.

jane.fallon.griffin@dailymail.ie

‘Too hard to get into med school’