Medical Council report showed more than 20,000 doctors were registered in Ireland last year IRELAND’S health system relies more on foreign-trained doctors than those of almost every other developed country, new figures have shown. The Medical Council’s annual report today revealed that there were 20,473 doctors registered in Ireland last year — the highest ever number. But of those 38 per cent — or 7,780 — were trained abroad, an increase of almost a thousand on 2014. The trend is even more apparent when compared to the start of the century, when there were 1,359 foreign trained doctors working here, accounting for 11 per cent of the total. On average, 17.1 per cent of doctors in any given country learnt their skills elsewhere. Of the 35 members of the “First World” OECD club, only two — Israel (58 per cent) and New Zealand (42.6 per cent) — have a bigger proportion than Ireland. Overseas recruits account for fewer than three per cent of all docs in Turkey, Poland, the Netherlands, Estonia and the Czech Republic, and under ten per cent in France, Germany and Spain. Even in the UK, just 28 per cent of its 172,561 doctors are foreign, while only a quarter of the 859,470 physicians plying their trade in the US qualified outside its borders. A spokeswoman for the Medical Council said: “Ireland is obviously an attractive destination for doctors to come and work and so the number of international medical graduates is continuing to rise. “Although it is very positive that the number of doctors on the register is rising, there are some factors that need to be considered. “We’ve found that doctors who qualified outside of Ireland are more likely to exit the register than doctors who qualified in Ireland, so therefore that’s an issue from a planning perspective. “There’s also an ethical dimension to consider in that many of these doctors are leaving developing countries.” The spokeswoman also commented on why Irish trainee doctors are leaving the country to find work. She said a study published last month showed that the biggest drivers were “understaffing in the workplace (82 per cent), carrying out too many non-core tasks (75 per cent), and limited career progression opportunities (72 per cent).” The MCI report also revealed 369 complaints were made against doctors in 2015, up by 19 per cent on the previous year, and five practitioners were struck off the register, compared to just one in 2014. The vast majority of complaints were filed by members of the public, with 25 made by fellow healthcare professionals and two by the HSE. Some 40 per cent of the grievances related to allegations of poor communication. Other top gripes concerned diagnosis, clinical investigations and the level of dignity in treating patients. The report also found that while the medical profession remains dominantly male, most of those entering the field today are women. Medical Council chief executive Bill Prasifka said: “I found it particularly interesting that although males continue to dominate the medical profession as a whole, since we began collating this data, there have been more Irish female graduates entering the medical profession than their male counterparts. “The majority of those on the register between the ages of 30 and 44 are female; however from 44 years and on the number of females on the register begins to decrease. “Data from our Your Training Counts report also found that 40 per cent of female trainees — or tomorrow’s specialists — want to work less than full-time and this definitely poses some questions for those future planning Ireland’s healthcare service.” Source
