Health crisis being discussed at conference today
Future additional hospital beds are not necessary if primary care is properly resourced.
That is the claim by the CEO of the National Association of General Practitioners who says transitional funding must be put in place to treat patients in the community.
The Primary Care Partnership Conference is taking place today which will see hundreds of professionals discuss Irelands health crisis.
Chris Goodey says other countries have similar bed capacity to Ireland because of long-term investment in Primary Care: "If we look at countries like Denmark and we look at Sweden and New Zealand and Canada, they have sort of similar bed numbers to ourselves in proportion to the population.
"The reason for this is because the last ten or fifteen years, they have been investing heavily in primary care and for example Denmark spend 14% of their budget on general practice alone, we spend 3% just to put it in perspective."
