Angelika Mertens really only wants one thing for her father: that he can go in peace. The 87-year-old has been living in a nursing home for three years, can no longer walk, also has dementia and is losing more and more weight due to leukemia in old age. Basically, she can watch her father gradually disappear, says Mertens, who explains very openly and personally why we shouldn’t write her real name. The last thing she wants him to do is move to another home. “That would be really shitty,” she says frankly.
But it may be heading towards this: The operator of the home in northern Germany filed for bankruptcy at the end of January. According to its own information, the owner-managed Convivo Group from Bremen operates more than 100 care facilities in Germany and employs around 5,000 people. For the time being, operations will continue, the salaries of the employees are probably secured until the end of March. However, the future is open. Although there is hope that new investors will get involved, the continued existence of each individual institution would not be guaranteed.
Convivo is just one example of a new problem that is apparently growing rapidly: cost increases, staff shortages and funding gaps are affecting the economic substance of more and more operators of nursing homes and services. For a long time, and for understandable reasons, the high workload of nursing staff was at the center of public attention when it came to geriatric care. For some time now, the problem of increasing financial burdens on those in need of care has also come into focus. However: If care places become more expensive, that does not mean that more money will be left behind by the operators of the care facilities. On the contrary: Their revenues are increasingly lagging behind the accelerated rise in costs.
“We actually need an expansion of care places, not a reduction”
“We are experiencing that an increasing number of home operators are in existential difficulties,” confirms Thomas Greiner, President of the Employers’ Association for Care (AGVP) and warns: “If things continue like this, then geriatric care in Germany will rush into a supply catastrophe.” Maria Loheide from The board of the Diakonie formulated it less drastically, but she also sees the care of the elderly on the way to a “precarious situation”, as she told the FAZ. Anyone looking for outpatient care often has to request 15 to 20 services today in order to at least get a commitment. And the next free place at home is sometimes 150 kilometers away. “We would therefore actually need an expansion of care places, not a reduction,” she warns.
But the reality looks like this: Shortly before the Convivo, the Curata Group had already applied for insolvency proceedings under self-administration, also a large private institution with more than 40 facilities and more than 3000 employees in Germany. Shortly thereafter, a German Red Cross retirement home in Wolfsburg announced its closure. Then it hit a home in Vögelsen in the Lüneburg district. In a rural area near Stuttgart, a subsidiary of Diakonie Stetten is closing the only nursing home in town. The list could be extended with many more examples. What is usually only a topic for regional media in individual cases is developing into a trend.
The reasons behind the closures and insolvencies are always similar: First, the corona pandemic caused a surge in costs, among other things due to expensive infection control measures; then the consequences of the Ukraine war drove up heating and other material costs; and on top of that, there were rising personnel costs due to the new wage requirements for nursing staff that have been in force since autumn. Politicians have temporarily helped out with the tax-financed “Corona rescue package”. But since this was folded in mid-2022, the cost pressure has hit the operators with full force.