A high level of sick leave among staff aggravates the hospital emergency
A nurse stands at the bedside of an intensive care patient behind a dialysis machine in a hospital in Osnabrück
Source: dpa/Friso Gentsch
The German Hospital Society reports 30 to 40 percent more staff failures than usual at this time of year. The high number of sick leaves aggravates the situation in clinics: in many places beds are blocked or entire wards have to be logged off.
den clinics are currently experiencing an above-average level of sick leave among employees. “We are now likely to have a nine to ten percent staff shortage, which means that almost every tenth employee is ill,” said Gerald Gaß, managing director of the German Hospital Society (DKG), of the German news agency . That’s 30 to 40 percent more breakdowns than usual this time of year.
Many employees are affected by infectious diseases, which also cause a large number of patients. In addition to Corona, influenza and RS viruses in children are currently causing many diseases across the country.
The personnel situation is slim, however, Gass said. “As a result, beds are currently blocked in a number of hospitals or entire wards have to be logged off. We are not allowed to treat if we fall below staffing limits.” Children’s hospitals are particularly hard hit because many nurses work there with additional training “It’s not so easy to distribute staff from an adult ward to a children’s ward.”
There is no easy fix in this situation. “An adjustment screw would ease red tape and documentation requirements. The Minister of Health should go back and give hospitals some leeway,” Gass said. “It should now be consistently stated that nurses only need to document the most necessary things that are important for patient treatment and can otherwise concentrate on care”.
The head of the DKG has also spoken out in favor of suspending the lower personnel limits. “In a situation like this, it makes sense to give hospitals the responsibility of deciding where they can organize good care with a little less staff.”
Intensive care doctor Christian Karagiannidis believes that the expected burden on the healthcare system due to the lack of skilled workers is greater than that caused by the corona pandemic. “The pandemic has not been good, but compared to what we will have to face in the next ten years, it has been a much smaller problem,” Karagiannidis told Berlin’s “tageszeitung”. He therefore pushed for massive immigration.
“We will lose around 500,000 retiring employees across all occupational groups every year,” warned the president of the German Society for Internal Medicine Intensive Care and Emergency Medicine (DIVI). For this reason, millions of jobs could not be filled. “These workers are missing as healthcare providers, they are missing as contributors – this is still completely underestimated,” Karagiannidis said. If something isn’t done now, “the health care system will crash.”
As a way out, the doctor, who is also head of a special center at the Cologne-Multiheim lung clinic, has been campaigning for the targeted recruitment of young people abroad. Otherwise the gaps in personnel could not be filled. “The only thing that would increase the number of workers would be large-scale structured migration.” In countries with high birth rates and high youth unemployment, young people could be brought to Germany immediately after school.
“After the three years of training, they should decide for themselves whether to stay here or go back to their home country,” Karagiannidis campaigned for the right to stay. “But it should be done quickly now,” he urged them to hurry. At the same time, however, he expressed skepticism about the implementation: “Unfortunately, I don’t see that at all in the current political climate.”
Clinics and doctor’s offices are also complaining of bottlenecks in a number of medicines. The president of the German Medical Association, Klaus Reinhardt, has called on the population to help each other with the medicine cabinet. “Now only solidarity helps. If you are healthy, you must give medicine to the sick. We need something like flea markets for medicines in the neighborhood, ”he told the“ Tagesspiegel ”.
The Federal Union of German Pharmacists’ Associations (ABDA) complained about unnecessary bureaucracy. “Of course, individually made fever juice at the pharmacy costs more and health insurance companies won’t reimburse it if it’s not prescribed on the prescription. But the doctor cannot know that there will be no fever juice at the pharmacy,” he said. Gabriele Overwiening of the German press agency. This creates a completely unnecessary bureaucracy due to the health insurance companies.
In his view, it would make sense for pharmacies to decide for themselves when to produce the drug. Another issue is the extra time, Overwiening said. Because: “Not even we are allowed to produce it in advance.”
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