The shortage of doctors may be exacerbated in the future by a high drop-out rate of interns in medical school, the Irish Medical Council (IMC) has said.
In one medical school 25 per cent of first-year interns have given up their training, according to Mr Brendan Healy, chairman of the Fitness to Practise Committee of the council.
Mr Healy said people were dropping out of medical school and mainly going into the pharmaceutical and technology sectors. He said long hours in the medical profession were a factor in the drop-out rate.
"There is a shortage of doctors in every hospital. Practice is going to have to change," he said.
The council wanted more recruitment of doctors who had trained here but had gone abroad. "We are paying for producing graduates but are not recruiting them back," Mr Healy said.
Although temporary registration is given to doctors from countries such as India, Pakistan, Egypt, Sudan and Iraq, only about half take up jobs here, he said.
While the number of doctors applying for temporary registration decreased up to 1997, the numbers have since increased, with a total of 95 applications this year.
A questionnaire is to be sent out to the 12,000 doctors fully registered with the IMC next month so as to gauge attitudes to work and training and form a demographic profile of the medical profession.
"This is a professional profile for each doctor, telling us their age and sex, who is working here and who is not, their disciplines, their career plans," the president of the IMC, Prof Gerard Bury, said.
He added that the questionnaire, which is voluntary, would also ask about training doctors had completed and training bodies they were affiliated to. He said the object of the questionnaire was not to assess ways of keeping doctors from moving abroad but to form a profile of doctors, their training and their needs.
The questionnaire will come under the terms of the Freedom of Information Act late next year, which will also apply to reports carried out by the council.
However, the council said fitness-to-practise cases taken against doctors would probably not come under the scope of the Act. "Fitness to practise is unlikely to be included because of the legal requirements until the end-stage . . . It also involves two parties, one of which is a private individual who may not want the case to be made public," a council spokesman said.