Junior doctors are to be drafted in from Austria for the first time next month to fill vacancies in a number of Irish hospitals.
The initiative is one of a number by the Department of Health in an attempt to prevent a shortage of non-consultant hospital doctors (NCHDs) next month.
Many NCHDs change jobs every six months, moving on January 1st and July 1st, and over the past few years a number of NCHD posts have remained vacant when these deadlines passed.
As of yesterday, 40 NCHD posts remained to be filled by January 1st, with hospitals in Waterford, Cork, Limerick, Tipperary, Galway, Mullingar, and Dublin placing newspaper advertisements in recent days seeking candidates to fill them.
A spokesman for the Department of Health said efforts were continuing to fill the posts and the Department was confident they could be filled within the next 10 days.
The president of the Irish Medical Organisation, Dr Mick Molloy, said he was disappointed at the number of vacancies. "It reflects the inability of the hospitals and health service in general to retain Irish graduates in positions which are available in Irish hospitals.
"We are now becoming increasingly reliant on travelling the world to recruit doctors and many of the countries from where we employ them need their doctors more than we do," he said.
Dr Molloy, himself an NCHD at St Vincent's Hospital, Dublin, said some NCHDs still had to work 100 hours a week and this impacted on the vacancy rate.
"Many Irish graduates are going abroad where they will have shorter hours, better training and better promotional prospects," he said.
There are 3,300 NCHDs jobs to be filled every year, but Dr Molloy estimates that less than a third of these will fall vacant on the first of next month.
About half of all NCHD posts are now being filled by foreign doctors.
"Even if three vacancies out of the 40 were in a hospital with a small number of NCHDs, it could be enough to reasonably curtail services within that hospital," he said.