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fromJutta Rippegather
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shut down
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A patient with acute back problems remains on hold at the medical on-call service. Association of Statutory Health Insurance Physicians speaks of bottlenecks.
He was in pain. Starting from the back over the hips and into the leg. “The pain was almost unbearable.” Drugs had no effect, says Eberhard Bacher. And the practices of his orthopedic surgeon and family doctor were closed for vacation. So he sought help from the medical on-call service 116 117. The man from Frankfurt sums up what he experienced there with one word: “Catastrophe.” Despite hours of attempts, it was not possible to reach someone on 116 117: “It is left to chance. when a connection is established. “
The Association of Statutory Health Insurance Physicians Hessen (KV) admits that there are currently bottlenecks. “KV Hessen is continuously working on increasing accessibility and reducing waiting times,” said press spokesman Alexander Kowalski when asked by the Frankfurter Rundschau.
Contact
The medical on-call service is responsible for non-life-threatening acute complaints when the practices are closed; around the weekend or in the evening.
Are reachable the dispatch centers in Frankfurt and Kassel via 116 117. They arrange house calls as required or to one of the 70 on-call centers in Hesse. jur
www.bereitschaftsdienst-hessen.de
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Almost ten years ago, the 116 117 was introduced nationwide as a contact point for acute complaints outside the opening hours of the doctor’s office. The appointment service point was added later. Two years ago, KV organized an elaborate campaign to make the number better known. She could have saved the money. “In the meantime, everyone is calling who has any questions about Corona,” says spokesman Kowalski. 116 117 is not responsible for Covid-19. This misunderstanding is the reason that the number is occasionally overloaded.
FR reader Bacher reports what this looks like from the perspective of a patient on a Sunday: He tried to establish a connection for two hours. “The only reaction was an answering machine with the message: ‘Welcome to 116 117, we will help you if you are sick, press 2.’” Another connection was announced, followed by the familiar text: “Welcome in the …”. All family members would have tried it on different devices – also without success. “After more than two hours, my daughter from Offenbach had a lucky hit.”
The doctor came five hours later, at 11.30 p.m., to temporarily relieve the man from Frankfurt from his pain. “That is a situation that you cannot accept,” says Bacher, who assumes that he is not the only one. “What kind of health service is that that promises what it doesn’t keep?”
The so-called answering machine, says the KV spokesman, sorts the callers to the right place. “At the federal level, this is initially the choice between information and appointments for the corona vaccination and the patient service.” When pressing the 2, acutely ill people would be referred to the medical on-call service. This does not always work smoothly at the moment: “Due to the increased awareness of 116 117 due to the corona pandemic, there are extreme peaks in the number of calls, especially on weekends.” This leads to waiting times and overloading the system. “The procedure of repeatedly dialing 116 117 via a wide variety of devices does not relieve the caller burden, but unfortunately has a counterproductive effect.”
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