All medics and teachers should have to work here

THE internal review into the death of Aoife Johnston revealed the cruel agony that the youngster and her distressed parents suffered while waiting 12 hours for treatment in a so-called emergency department. On a lesser note, it also exposed the hideous pressure that frontline hospital staff endure from overcrowding and staff shortages, with one nurse in charge of up to 67 sick patients, including Aoife, all waiting to be seen in one section of the emergency department.

Toxic levels of workplace stress, coupled with poor resources and an offhand attitude from the HSE, rank higher than the search for the good life or swimming in the Great Barrier Reef as the chief reasons for Irish doctors and nurses leaving the country when they graduate.

If we take their word for it, it appears that HSE conditions are so inhumane that any modicum of guilt at leaving a country that is crying out for their skills – and which, after shelling out for the elite education of medical graduates in particular, may have a reasonable expectation of benefiting from those same skills – evaporates the moment they set foot in the airport.

BUT our loss is the planet’s gain. New Zealand has a similar population to ours yet it trains only a fraction of our number of doctors, safe in the knowledge that it has a steady supply from the Emerald Island. We in turn depend on recruiting about 40% of our doctors from abroad, which brings its own problems, not least of them around communication.

Minister Simon Harris’s offer to subsidise Irish medical students to study in the North on condition that they commit to working in the HSE is a recognition of the absurd situation whereby we fall below the OECD average number of doctors per head of population despite churning out graduates by the bucketload. In 2021, 724 doctors graduated in the country. The following year, 442 Irish doctors were issued with temporary work visas for Australia.

So why not extend Simon Harris’s proposal to all doctors trained on the island of Ireland? Give them all the chance to repay the investment in their training, which is one of the most costly educations at third level, whether it take place in Belfield or Belfast?

The exodus of medical graduates is a vicious circle. The more doctors who leave the country, the more understaffing is exacerbated and the more intolerable things become for the next crop of graduates and their patients, and so on.

If we could oblige all graduates to work here for a few years it would – among other initiatives admittedly – improve working conditions and stabilise the health service. The current problem of hospital overcrowding, which took the life of teenage Aoife Johnston, is an emergency that justifies unprecedented measures.

It’s also alarming that the brain drain is spreading, with rising house prices blamed for the rising number of teachers heading to Dubai. The teacher shortage is so severe that secondary schools are forced to cut back on core subjects while other schools have introduced teacher-sharing schemes.

Like doctors and nurses, teachers do work of enormous strategic importance for the country and the requirement that they practise their profession in the country that trained them, even for a year or two, could be considered a form of national service.

GRADUATE doctors, nurses and teachers might be entitled to ask why they should be grounded by a form of national service when arts graduates and engineers are free to spread their wings. The answer may be that we have plenty of graduates in geography and film studies, but that the taxpayer-funded supply chain for medics and teachers has all but collapsed.

Also, no one is asking them to toil at home forever. Nor is anyone denying that experience overseas is an invaluable part of their training.

But even a dozing arts graduate can see that the culture around medical training can’t continue indefinitely.