When you think of the word ‘doctor’ you immediately think of a caring individual. A vocation. You go into medicine because you genuinely want to make people better.

As a patient from a certain age group, I have an image of an always on-call friendly face whose nearest male child would probably move into the seat when the time came.

You never thought that your GP was a business. That surgery you went to needed lights, running water, furniture. The friendly receptionist had to be paid. The doctor himself had a high level of professionalism that deserved to be paid.

We didn’t really think about these things until everything came under the focus of ‘market forces’. We can park the rights and wrong of market forces and try to look at it from a young GP’s view.

Dr Aifric Boylan is an Irish doctor in Melbourne. She wasn’t that impressed with Jonathan Healy’s views yesterday that young doctors left Ireland because they got the ‘hump’. He was also thinking that doctors trained in Ireland have a ‘duty’ to work here as a ‘payback’ for their training.

You can hear the full interview here

I was ready to rant about Aifric too but listen to what she said. The system has been cut back so much that those practising are unable to do the bare minimum. The system is so broke that they felt unable to be part of the solution. Were they right or wrong? Listening to Aifric you could see her point.

Did we throw the baby out with the bath water? For once, I’m not going to rant or rave. Listen to the interview and you decide whether we went cut mad? Even from Melbourne, an Irish doctor still cares for our welfare.