Foreign doctors ‘don’t get essential training’

We rely heavily on overseas doctors to prop up our health service — but their training opportunities appear thin on the ground compared to our homegrown medical graduates, new figures indicate.

The Medical Council’s Medical Workforce Intelligence Report 2014, published yesterday, found that one-third of doctors practising in Ireland qualified elsewhere and that our reliance on international medical graduates was among the highest in the OECD — a fairly static state of affairs according to the council’s CEO, Caroline Spillane.

However, the roles undertaken by these overseas doctors differ to those of Irish graduates — for instance when it comes junior doctors, most of the training posts essential for career enhancement are not held by international medical graduates — in fact, three-quarters of doctors who work as junior doctors, and who were not in training, were overseas graduates.