Young doctors are leaving medical school with €100,000 of debt which is one of the major disincentives to setting up a GP practice, an Oireachtas Committee has heard.
With shortages of GPs across the country, representatives of the IMO said an "IDA style" structure was needed to provide financial supports and other incentives to help with the setting-up of a practice.
Dr Tadhg Crowley, of the IMO's GP committee, said setting up a practice is "financially crippling" and "very difficult, in the age we’re looking at work-life balance."
The days of coming out of college debt-free are gone, he said, saying it is the norm to have €100,000 debt by the time you leave medical school.
Then anyone setting up a general practice has to buy a house or building and hire staff: "By the time you set yourself up, you could find yourself in debt of close to a million," he told the committee.
IMO GP Committee Member Dr Madeleine Ní Dhálaigh said newly qualified GPs are very reluctant to set up on their own. This, she said, is particularly a problem along the west coast and in the midlands.
"Much in the way the IDA supports new businesses, we need to look at something like that for new GPs," she said.
She suggested the state should provide support with premises and equipment as well as tax reliefs. "What the state will receive in return is a multiple of what it will invest," she said.
Fianna Fáil TD John Lahart, said such a scheme sounds "very practical".
Social Democrats co-leader Roisin Shortall, said a new model of GP practice is needed, because the current model is not attractive to young graduates.
"Younger graduates do not want the sort of model that has been in place since the foundation of the state. They want to be medical practitioners and not business people. A lot of people coming out of college are broke as it is, they don’t want to be getting more loans," she said.
She said the roll-out of free GP care as part of the Sláintecare plan is something that the public really want. But she said a shortage of GPs presents a real obstacle.
"There is a major opportunity here for GPs to be part of something transformative for the health service," she said.
"It’s what people want. And it’s very disappointing if there’s a commitment to vastly expand primary care, and we don’t have the staff to to that, there’s a real obstacle."
Country facing GP "workforce crisis"
Earlier, the Irish College of GPs told the committee that Ireland is in the midst of a GP workforce and workload crisis, and that the Covid-19 pandemic has exacerbated longstanding workforce and workload challenges.
ICGP Medical Director Dr Diarmuid Quinlan said that compelling evidence from the UK shows that each additional GP for every 10,000 people was associated with fewer hospital admissions for both acute and chronic illness.
He said that a working Group on the future of general practice should be set up.
Val Moran of the Irish Medical Organisation said that an estimated 1,600 more GPs will be needed by 2028.
He told the Committee that, currently, there were around 3,500 GPs in Ireland - with 2,500 of these involved in caring for medical card patients.
Mr Moran said that Ireland has around 0.69 GPs for every 1,000 people, when it needed 1.1 for every 1,000 people.
He told the committee that GPs were closing their lists to new patients due to capacity pressures, adding that the IMO is in favour of Universal HealthCare.
However, he said the time scale was very tight and there was no point in having free GP care, if patients are waiting two weeks to see a GP.
Additional reporting: Fergal Bowers
