Sir,– A mistake by the Irish College of General Practitioners has resulted in it allocating extra GP training places to qualified doctors ("Mistake leads HSE to spend over €3 million for 12 extra trainee doctors", April 7th). This will result in an overall cost of less than €90,000 per doctor for each of the four years they will be training. The direct benefit to the HSE will be that these doctors will be performing a clinical service element in hospitals for at least 40 hours a week for their first two years and for the last two years they will be seeing patients in general practice with the constant support of an experienced GP when they are not improving their own skill-set with either in-practice or out-of-practice training.
Gaining access to an Irish GP training scheme is still considered very competitive so these doctors are already considered high-quality professionals. The hospital posts they will be filling would otherwise have been filled by a doctor that was subjected to a much less competitive selection process, or might not have been filled at all unless the HSE was paying locum rates at many times the hourly rate of the training GP.
As for giving a “free doctor” to GPs (ignoring all the overheads and trainers’ time that goes into supporting these training GPs), it does have a net effect of increasing the capacity of the practice to see patients at a less frantic pace than otherwise.
There is overwhelming evidence supporting continuity of care from GPs as the most effective way to deal with medical complexity and uncertainty, reducing healthcare inequity, unnecessary healthcare activity, total healthcare costs and population deaths.
I am aware that some of the Irish doctors who failed to get onto a GP training scheme were accepted on UK schemes. If they train in the UK for four years they are much less likely to return to Ireland, resulting in a massive loss to the Irish health system. If a financial forensic analysis of this mistake was performed, you might find that the HSE and Irish tax payers will benefit greatly from it. – Yours, etc,
Dr WILLIAM BEHAN,
Walkinstown, Dublin 12.