GUBU

GUBU
An Irish woman's social, political and domestic commentary

Friday, May 21, 2004

Women GPs

Myers is on a roll today in the IT, complaining that women GP's want part-time work and are leaving the profession in droves. As a result, there are not enough GPs in Ireland and we have to 'raid' Africa and Asia for doctors. It's all the fault of teenage girls being cleverer than teenage boys and 'taking' the medical school places. The only hope is to reduce the points for medicine and let more fellas in so we have enough GPs for the future. All of this is based on a survey the results of which are:

"The authors sent questionnaires to 200 women who graduated from GP training courses, 1995-2001, and 134 (67 per cent) replied. Of those, 13 per cent were no longer GPing: so, 16 graduates who had taken incredibly precious places in medical school had abandoned general practice relatively soon after graduating. A further one-third had already ceased full-time work. Over 40 per cent said in future they probably wouldn't work out-of-office hours, and nearly one in 10 declared they would never work non-social hours, come what may. Over 80 per cent declined to work as a single-GP in the country, and worst of all, only 10 per cent declared they wanted to remain full-time GPs. To round off the pretty picture, 75 per cent of all GP-trainees in Ireland are now women.

All in all, a very promising future for the sick of Ireland - provided they don't live in the country, get ill only during office hours, have no heart attacks at night, and most of all, give several months' notice of their intention of being unwell so that they get on the waiting list of the shrinking band of working she-doctors nice and early."

Of course the analysis is missing one huge chunk of information. What do male GPs want? How many of them dropped out, refused to work unsociable hours etc? Without this info, his point is useless.

posted by Sarah | 10:39 0 comments

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