Saturday 3rd July 2021
“There are too many hospitals”
Experts would close every third clinic
During the Corona crisis, the public got used to the fact that there can never be enough intensive care beds. Experts assess the German hospital landscape completely differently. Every third hospital is therefore superfluous, and less would often be more for the patients.
The chairman of the Federal Joint Committee of Health Insurance Funds, Doctors and Clinics (G-BA), Josef Hecken, calls for a fundamental reform of hospital care. Every third clinic in Germany is superfluous for medical care, said Hecken of the “Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung”. In the future, Germany will not need more, but significantly fewer clinic locations. The umbrella association of health insurance companies also sees a need for reform. This was made clear by the Corona crisis.
Hecken said: “We currently have 1900 hospitals, 1200 would be enough.” In addition, the clinics would have to divide the work more intelligently among themselves. Smaller rural hospitals should limit themselves to simple interventions, while sophisticated operations should only be performed in specialized centers. “That would be good for the economy and for the medical quality,” said Hecken.
According to the report, the health insurance companies spent around 80 billion euros on hospital services last year, plus eleven billion euros from the federal government. The expenditures for pharmaceuticals and resident doctors were therefore each around half as high. In order to curb the expected further increase in hospital costs, a comprehensive structural reform is necessary, said Hecken.
Corona crisis shows: “There is an acute need for reform”
For this, however, the federal states, which recently only contributed around three billion euros to the financing of the clinics, would have to forego their planning sovereignty over the hospitals, which is enshrined in the Basic Law. “Every state government wants to keep its hospitals. It’s not always about the well-being of the patient,” criticized Hecken, who has been the chairman of the self-administration of health insurance companies, doctors and clinics since 2012.
The spokesman for the National Association of Statutory Health Insurance (GKV), Florian Lanz, said: “The Corona crisis has shown that the need for reform in hospital care is not somehow theoretical, but very acute.” What is needed is “the safeguarding of care in the countryside, more specialization for particularly difficult cases and, overall, significantly better conditions for care, to name just three important keywords,” said Lanz.
In the summer of 2019, the Bertelsmann Foundation caused a stir with a study on hospital density in Germany. It proposed reducing the number of clinics to below 600. The authors had argued that the bundling of doctors and nursing staff as well as devices in fewer hospitals would lead to a higher quality of care. Medical representatives and clinics reacted with massive criticism.
.