Sinn Féin says a job guarantee for all health graduates would send out 'a very powerful message'.
The party has vowed to support the move in a bid to tackle 'chronic shortages' in some sectors.
David Cullinane is the party's health spokesperson. He told Newstalk Breakfast it is a statement of intent.
"We obviously want as many people as possible who train in the public system to come and work in the public healthcare system.
"We have tens of thousands of graduates who obviously train across a range of medical programmes and training programmes every year.
"We know that about 30% of those leave, and some don't come and work in the public system.
"We have a real crisis in our hospitals at the moment, but also we have very long long waiting lists.
"And one of the problems that we have... is the failure of the healthcare system to attract enough graduates into the system".
'More proactive HSE'
Deputy Cullinane says this is not the only solution that could help.
"I think what we need to do is to send out a very, very powerful message that we want graduates to come and work in the public system.
And what I also want, and what I've asked the Minister for Health to do, is for the HSE to be more proactive and more energetic with engaging with graduates in their final year.
"That would mean - from my perspective - the HSE entering into talks with graduates in their final year, encouraging as many of them to come and work in the public system, talking them through the job opportunities which exist."
He believes this would have to matched by increasing the number of training places.
"We're simply not training enough graduates - we have a real crisis internationally in nursing, for example.
"So we have to depend on international recruitment to attract the number of nurses we need to work in the Irish healthcare system.
"Also right across the system - we don't have enough speech and language therapists, we don't have enough homecare staff - there's lots of specialties where we're simply not training enough staff.
"And I've engaged with all of the training bodies over the last number of months, and they all say 'Of course we need to train more staff'.
"Of these 1,400 doctors that we train every year, about 400 of those leave for Australia alone".
He adds that other issues need to be looked at - including reasons why graduates leave, working conditions and safe staffing levels.
