Cork GP says normal working day is now 'around 12 hours’

A report by the Irish Medical Council has shown that nearly a quarter of doctors are working more than 48 hours per week, as a Cork GP said that an average day for a GP is 12 hours.

The council’s Medical Workforce Intelligence Report showed that the numbers of both GPs and general doctors increased in Cork in 2024, compared to the previous year, with 597 GPs and 2,382 total doctors currently registered, compared to 569 and 2,159 in the year previous.

Nationally, 1,025 doctors voluntarily withdrew from the register last year, a slight increase on 2023, with more than 600 people leaving to practice in another country.

The report found that 23% of Irish doctors reported working more than 48 hours on average per week, in contravention of the European Working Time Directive.

Almost half of the doctors who withdrew had trained outside Ireland, Britain, and the EU, but the number of doctors leaving was offset by 4,859 new doctors, with 64% graduating from outside Ireland, Britain, and the EU.

CHALLENGING

The medical council said that “retaining doctors who have trained in Ireland is challenging”, and that the long hours many are working “can lead to stress, burnout, and absenteeism, and increased risk to patient safety”.

Dr Diarmuid Quinlan, a Glanmire GP and medical director of the Irish College of General Practitioners, told The Echo that general practice had a high level of retention, saying “40% of our GP trainees are international medical graduates. The good news to date is that only the low single digits of people who have done their GP training in Ireland emigrate.

“They also stay largely in the region where they are trained; most who train in the north-east of Ireland stay in the north-east. 

"The take-back is: Money spent training GPs is money well spent.

“However, we have a very significant workforce deficit in Ireland,” he said, explaining that more than 6,000 are needed, while the latest figure, according to the council’s report, is 4,761.

He explained that they have been working closely with the HSE to expand the GP training programme, with 1,100 GPs currently in training, and a rural GP programme which places GPs from overseas in rural areas for two and a half years of training.

Dr Quinlan said: 

“We had three of these international rural doctors in Midleton, where the population has expanded very rapidly, and they’ve played a really important role.

“There’s a need for more GPs, particularly in rural areas. We also need to look at how to retain our workforce. 

"The normal GP working day is around 12 hours, as every two hours with a patient generates an additional one hour of non-patient work; issuing prescriptions, reading letters, looking at blood results and scan results, taking phonecalls. There’s the invisible work too, which makes the working day quite long.”

Ahead of Budget 2026, Dr Quinlan called for additional resources to support the continued expansion of the GP workforce and to double the number of GP nurses, explaining that they play a hugely important role in terms of vaccinations, in particular, which frees up time for GPs and also keeps people out of emergency departments.