The Irish Doctor in 2025

stainluss

DocDaneka wrote:

Now our years of famine have started and it gets worse everyday. By the time you graduate medicine will be a McDonaldesque career - low salary long hours no training, if you dont want it fine - there are hundreds more medical students waiting. If medicine is your vocation and you dont need sleep or food or family thats fine, by all means chose this career but otherwise watch out. And dont say you weren't warned..........

What's your prediction as to how it will be in Irish medicine in 2025?
Thought it would be interesting to get the input of people on the inside

Xeyn

It's difficult to predict. There is no denying that the healthcare system is sick. Some may even suggest it is on life support.
Training in Ireland currently is poor. Although in my field if you speak to some who are about to qualify as consultants you'd think they were the best trained spr's in the world. The truth however is very different. Speak to those who have seen a generation or two past through. The current system is producing an inferior end product to those in the past.

SHO years in this Ireland are purely service years no matter how you dress it up. In surgery the college has no desire to train in you in the area you want to progress in unless you know someone higher up. It's sad but true.
The little training you do get in 2-3 years as an SHO can be made up in weeks to a few months. That's it.

The salary issue is polarising. There is no debating that doctors earn a comfortable living.
Someone on this forum claimed I earned within the top 10% in the country then in another unrelated thread quoted figures that put my basic salary below the average wage in Dublin.
It is disheartening to know that a lot if not most of your hours will be paid at a lower rate than someone flipping burgers in McDonald's. But that has a lot to do with the tax situation currently crippling Ireland.
We earn considerably less than those who were here 4 years ago. And those this year will earn less than we did 6 months ago.
But doctors still would be comfortably middle class even if starting today.
There is very little carrot to attract doctors to Ireland. There has however been talk of introducing a stick (forced service)
NCHDS need one of two or three things to want to stay.

1) Good working conditions ie. reasonable hours, good work to life balance and adequately resourced hospitals.

You'll take a lower wage if you're given the above.

2) Adequate monetary compensation.

You can put up with shoddy conditions if you're well compensated for it.

3) Good training and career prospects.

You can slog your way through difficult conditions and less pay if you're garunteed a high quality training scheme for all if not most, with the prospect of a better job at the end.

Currently very few jobs in Ireland offer any let alone two or three of the above.
And unless that changes the exodus will continue.

The bright side is things can change. Hopefully they will. It'll be hard going for a while still but maybe we can see a very different health system in 10 years time.

take everything

Xeyn wrote: »

It's difficult to predict. There is no denying that the healthcare system is sick. Some may even suggest it is on life support.
Training in Ireland currently is poor. Although in my field if you speak to some who are about to qualify as consultants you'd think they were the best trained spr's in the world. The truth however is very different. Speak to those who have seen a generation or two past through. The current system is producing an inferior end product to those in the past.

SHO years in this Ireland are purely service years no matter how you dress it up. In surgery the college has no desire to train in you in the area you want to progress in unless you know someone higher up. It's sad but true.
The little training you do get in 2-3 years as an SHO can be made up in weeks to a few months. That's it.

The salary issue is polarising. There is no debating that doctors earn a comfortable living.
Someone on this forum claimed I earned within the top 10% in the country then in another unrelated thread quoted figures that put my basic salary below the average wage in Dublin.
It is disheartening to know that a lot if not most of your hours will be paid at a lower rate than someone flipping burgers in McDonald's. But that has a lot to do with the tax situation currently crippling Ireland.
We earn considerably less than those who were here 4 years ago. And those this year will earn less than we did 6 months ago.
But doctors still would be comfortably middle class even if starting today.
There is very little carrot to attract doctors to Ireland. There has however been talk of introducing a stick (forced service)
NCHDS need one of two or three things to want to stay.

1) Good working conditions ie. reasonable hours, good work to life balance and adequately resourced hospitals.

You'll take a lower wage if you're given the above.

2) Adequate monetary compensation.

You can put up with shoddy conditions if you're well compensated for it.

3) Good training and career prospects.

You can slog your way through difficult conditions and less pay if you're garunteed a high quality training scheme for all if not most, with the prospect of a better job at the end.

Currently very few jobs in Ireland offer any let alone two or three of the above.
And unless that changes the exodus will continue.

The bright side is things can change. Hopefully they will. It'll be hard going for a while still but maybe we can see a very different health system in 10 years time.

Just on the salary issue.
Interesting to see many of the banks pulling out of the graduate loan game (if today's SBP is to be be believed anyway). With just BOI offering a fees-only loan.
An admission as good as any that doctors (at SHO/reg level not to mention Consultant level- the low number of posts being taken up telling their own story there) are certainly not coining it.

j.mcdrmd

take everything wrote: »

Just on the salary issue.
Interesting to see many of the banks pulling out of the graduate loan game (if today's SBP is to be be believed anyway). With just BOI offering a fees-only loan.
An admission as good as any that doctors (at SHO/reg level not to mention Consultant level- the low number of posts being taken up telling their own story there) are certainly not coining it.

I too question if the SBP is correct, because if Ulster Bank pulled the loans from the University of Limerick, Graduate Entry Medicine scheme, that would be headline news, not an aside.