Lack of staff big problem
Medical associations: “The situation in children’s hospitals is dramatic”
06/01/2022, 03:48 am
Fewer beds with an increasing number of cases – the situation in children’s hospitals in Germany has worsened in recent years. Doctors are sounding the alarm. The system had been shut down for a long time. The shortage of nurses will exacerbate the problem.
Medical associations denounce dramatic supply bottlenecks and abuses in German children’s hospitals. The reason is above all a lack of staff, so that many hospital beds cannot be occupied, said the President of the Society for Child and Adolescent Medicine, Jörg Dötsch, the newspapers of the Funke media group. “In the fall, almost all children’s hospitals were completely overwhelmed. That could threaten again next fall if the situation doesn’t change by then,” he warned.
Dötsch said the care of children in the hospital is more difficult to calculate than that of adults. From a purely economic point of view, children’s hospitals are therefore often not worthwhile. In addition, there are binding minimum staffing levels: for example, a nurse may look after a maximum of ten children at night. With each additional child, an additional force must be planned – which is often missing. As a result, many beds cannot be operated due to a lack of staff.
Dötsch reprimanded that one should not only think purely economically. Because with child and youth medicine it is like with the fire brigade: “The fire brigade is financed, even when there is no fire.” According to Dötsch, even at normal times, six or seven clinics are called through until a suitable bed is found. “It has also happened that we have transferred children across the border to Luxembourg, Belgium or the Netherlands.” This is a huge burden for the children and families.
Working conditions for nursing staff not attractive
According to the Society for Child and Adolescent Medicine, between 1991 and 2017, the number of beds in paediatrics fell by a third. During the same period, however, the annual number of cases increased: from an average of 900,000 children and adolescents treated to more than one million. The Secretary General of the German Interdisciplinary Association for Intensive Care and Emergency Medicine, Florian Hoffmann, agreed with Dötsch. “The situation in the children’s hospitals is dramatic and is likely to get worse.” But a system that has been shut down for years cannot simply be restarted. “Even if politicians take countermeasures now, changes will take effect in a few years at the earliest. The trend will continue to go downhill for the time being,” he told Funke-Blätter.
Far worse than insufficient reimbursements is another problem, he said. “We will be able to operate fewer and fewer beds in the children’s hospitals due to the lack of nursing staff.” The working conditions and development opportunities made it increasingly difficult to keep nurses in the profession in the long term. The shortage has dire consequences, he warned. “In many German children’s hospitals, on average a third of the beds in the children’s intensive care units cannot be used due to a lack of staff. In some hospitals even half can no longer be occupied. If there are waves of infection, as they usually do in autumn, we don’t stand a chance to take care of all the children.”