Why doctors should be more like soldiers
The serious investment that goes into training medical students deserves to be repaid to the state
Ireland produces more medical graduates than almost every OECD country per head of population. Yet many of them are simply “doctors for export”.
This was Professor John Crown’s terminology in a recent Seanad debate to describe the contradiction at the heart of the Irish health service.
Expensively trained Irish doctors are exported in a context where foreign-trained medical graduates are imported to fill the shortfall.
However, Ireland employs “the lowest number of career-level doctors ...
