Young doctors will leave the country post-pandemic because structural and capacity issues in the Irish health service continue to go unaddressed, a consultant has warned.
Dr Fergal Hickey of the Irish Association for Emergency Medicine told RTÉ radio’s Today with Claire Byrne show that people would vote with their feet.
They would go abroad to Australia, New Zealand and the Middle East, where conditions and resources were better, he said.
Many who had answered the call “to assist the mother country” at the start of the pandemic were disappointed that nothing had changed.
There is much frustration among frontline health staff that the system did not make any progress, despite changes made as a result of Covid-19.
Dr Hickey said much of the physical infrastructure of the health service in Ireland “is ancient” and was “genuinely poor”.
“They are tired and frustrated that structural issues have not been addressed and are not likely to be addressed,” he said.
Others were retiring early, he added.
Emergency departments
Dr Hickey said that while he welcomed the lifting of Covid restrictions, he was surprised that they had been lifted “in one fell swoop” and had not been more graduated.
Emergency departments were still going to see cases of Covid, he said. Even though a small percentage would become seriously ill and require hospitalisation, a small percentage of a large volume was still a significant number, especially with a “frail” health service which continued to have capacity issues.
While attendance at emergency departments had dropped during the first lockdown, in late 2021 it had in some cases broken records and had been higher than 2019.
Critical care in Ireland continued to be half the OECD average, he said.
