Sir, – You report that the Irish College of General Practitioners (ICGP) will try to attract 100 non-EU GPs, mainly South African doctors, to fill vacancies in unattractive rural Irish practices (“Over 100 foreign doctors sought for rural GP practices in bid to ease shortage”, News, December 29th).
If the GP posts are unattractive to Irish doctors because of an excessive workload, long hours and poor support from the rest of the health service, it is unfair to expect foreign doctors to work in the same difficult conditions.
Foreign doctors are deserving of the same respect as Irish doctors.
There is also the ethical issue of whether the ICGP and the Irish State should engage in organised “poaching” of valuable doctors from the South African health service which is in a greater state of crisis than the Irish service.
The ICGP, the HSE and the Department of Health must have anticipated the problems of rural practices years ago. It is high time that they all got together to find a long-lasting solution that won’t disadvantage foreign doctors and foreign health services. – Yours, etc,
Dr TOM O’ROURKE,
(Retired GP),
Gorey,
Co Wexford.
Sir, – Extending GP opening hours to later evening clinics and Saturday clinics is not supporting GPs through this winter crisis. It is simply stretching us even thinner and running us even more ragged.
Supporting GPs should look very different. It should bolster us to provide daytime service to meet the winter demand. It should help us to maintain a reasonable home time. It should protect our time off. It should protect our family time and our weekends. Give us resources to buy in help to ease workload. Some robust public health messaging empowering patients to self-care for self-limiting viral illness would assist. Give more funding to pay for out-of-hours doctors.
This relentless messaging that GPs are an infinite resource that can suddenly find the guts of two extra working days per week in the middle of winter is offensive. We all live in dread of the winter workload. Our Christmas present this year was removal of the financial Covid consult supports one week, then the next week we are told to we are expected to forget about evening closure time and open up for Saturdays to boot.
The HSE seems to have no concept that GPs are people with needs! We all have personal lives and commitments outside of work. Many have young children to collect from child-minders and homework to supervise, etc, just like everyone else. Our staff have working conditions and contracts and cannot suddenly be expected to work these extra hours at the drop of a hat!
This kind of toxic leadership messiah complex modelling is the very reason we cannot attract and retain young GPs and all it will do is burn out the beleaguered GPs on the ground already on their last nerve. – Yours, etc,
Dr BRIAN KENNEDY,
General Practitioner,
Nenagh,
Co Tipperary.