Kevin Myers: Do we have medical schools in order to provide extremely expensive proof of the academic superiority of teenage girls over teenage boys? Or do we invest in our medical schools to provide our society with doctors for the 40 or so years after they qualify? There is a difference, you know.
The Irish Medical Journal recently published a paper by two doctors, Davida De La Harpe and Fiona Graham, on the future of Irish women GPs. And frankly, if things are as bad as they seem, we might as
well start interviewing the undergraduates of African and Indian medical schools right now. That way, we might just get the pick of the crop in a few years' time, when the she-doctors decide a full working day is far too much - what? work nights? weekends? you must be joking! - and opt either for the occasional bout of daytime chest-tapping, or even get out of medicine altogether.
The authors sent questionnaires to 200 women who graduated from GP training courses, 1995-2001, and 134 (67 per cent) replied. Of those, 13 per cent were no longer GPing: so, 16 graduates who had taken incredibly precious places in medical school had abandoned general practice relatively soon after graduating. A further one-third had already ceased full-time work. Over 40 per cent said in future they probably wouldn't work out-of-office hours, and nearly one in 10 declared they would never work non-social hours, come what may. Over 80 per cent declined to work as a single-GP in the country, and worst of all, only 10 per cent declared they wanted to remain full-time GPs. To round off the pretty picture, 75 per cent of all GP-trainees in Ireland are now women.
All in all, a very promising future for the sick of Ireland - provided they don't live in the country, get ill only during office hours, have no heart attacks at night, and most of all, give several months' notice of their intention of being unwell so that they get on the waiting list of the shrinking band of working she-doctors nice and early.
Look, it might actually be far worse. These figures are for only two-thirds of the GP trainees. The other third didn't even reply. Why was that? Was it because they're already out of the profession, and felt guilty? Because if that's so, we're looking at a short-term medical catastrophe. It would mean, for example, that of the 200 trainees, 40 per cent were already, within the time-span of a studentship, no longer working as GPs - apart, perhaps, from when the theatre manager makes his plaintive little plea.
That is speculation, of course; what is not are the intentions of the two-thirds who answered the questionnaire. I repeat: only 10 per cent intend to have a full-time career, available all-hours, and fully two-thirds expect to be working only part-time.
But hold on. These are the people who have taken rare, much-prized and socially vital places in medical college. We can't whisk replacements out of a hat the moment they decide to work only when there is an "r" in the month and maybe every second Tuesday. So, we're going to have to find ways of curbing the attrition of these vital young sawbones so soon after they leave college. One is by intervention at the very start of their putative careers, by interviewing applicants for those precious medical places in college, and asking them: Well, what do you intend to do with your medical career when you start a family? But of course, that kind of question is almost certainly illegal under our insane equality laws, and so, we're trapped in the nets of dogmatic nonsense of the gender-equality ideologists. We are thus creating an entirely unsustainable medical system which will, of itself, fall apart within a decade or so.
So how are we to replace the armies of women doctors who leave? Why, by plundering the Third World, of course. So, just in the nick of time, over the horizon thunder the black and tan warriors of the Hippocratic Light Horse, drawn from the medical schools of Africa and India - which of course have no inhibitions about asking applicants for their incredibly precious places in medical school about their long-term commitment to the profession.
The authors of the IMJ paper are clearly true doctors: their naïvety is quite bewitching in its unworldliness. So, stars glittering in their eyes, they suggest that the career preferences of women GPs should be taken into account in "the planning and implementation of primary care", and since part-time partnerships are women's career choice, this work practice needs to be "expanded and supported".
Expanded and supported? God almighty, expanded and supported by what and by whom? There aren't enough doctors as it is. And how can you plan your primary care when the primary carers are back at home, caring primarily for their families? These are hole-in-the-bucket solutions to hole-in-the-bucket problems. We should be trying to prevent the hole in the first place, which is what you'd do if you chose your students as much by commitment as by points.
Intellectually, medical students are absurdly over-endowed for a career which involves 90 per cent mucous, 9 per cent self-pity, and 1 per cent genuine illness. It's a fair swap, surely, if the graduate intake has to drop a few trivial points in academic excellence in exchange for brio, enthusiasm and long-term commitment.
But, no. We prefer the futile myths of the equality agenda, and we will have to be bailed out of the resulting disaster by luring doctors from wretched, AIDS-wracked, medically-deprived Third World countries.
Sheer folly; and wicked, moreover.