‘Government health service plans require an extra 1,000 GPs’

IRELAND will need at least an extra 1,000 GPs to facilitate Government plans to overhaul the health service, a major conference on health reform heard yesterday.

Proposals by Health Minister James Reilly to introduce a Dutch style health service here may not work, delegates were told at the forum, “A New Government — New Health System?” at University College Cork.

“We already have a problem retaining a sufficient number of doctors in our system,” IMO president Dr Ronan Boland told delegates at the conference hosted by the Health Economics Group in the Department of Economics at UCC.