For months, Berlin's emergency rooms have been overloaded due to a lack of staff and the increasing number of cases. According to a report by the "Tagesspiegel", many clinics are also affected by crime.
According to the report, police officers are deployed to a hospital more than 8,000 times a year. The "Tagesspiegel" refers to a previously unpublished response from Interior Secretary Torsten Akmann (SPD) to a question from the CDU legal expert Alexander J. Herrmann. Large clinics in the city center are by far the most affected.
The Vivantes Clinic Friedrichshain counted the most police operations: 492 in 2018, 529 in the following year, 594 in 2020, 583 last year and 2022 by mid-July 295 cases. This is followed by the Neukölln hospital, which also belongs to the state-owned Vivantes chain, with 581 (2018), 513 (2019), 474 (2020), 513 (2021) and 307 (so far 2022) operations. This is followed by the Queen Elisabeth Herzberge Evangelical Hospital in Lichtenberg, where there are increasing numbers of psychiatric operations: 451 (2018), 407 (2019), 475 (2020), 480 (2021) and 330 (so far 2022). The Urban Hospital and the Charité locations in Wedding and Mitte are also heavily affected.
The numbers above refer to deployments on all possible incidents. According to the "Tagesspiegel", the letter from the Senate also lists specific so-called "victim offences", which means mainly physical harm and coercion, but also attempted manslaughter. While 790 such acts were reported in clinics in 2020, the figure was 823 in the following year and 441 by mid-July 2022.
According to the report, the clinics say that most of the operations take place in the emergency services. Often intoxicated patients, psychiatric cases and clan casseroles played a role. In addition, many men ended up in the emergency rooms who had just been involved in a stabbing, a mugging or a fight, i.e. were “excited”.
According to the “Tagesspiegel”, nurses and doctors from Neukölln, Mitte and Friedrichshain also report threats and attacks by men from the clan milieu known to the police, who come to the clinics in dozens and always ignore the obligation to wear masks and restrictions on visits. State Secretary Akmann is quoted as saying that it is not "researchable" how many of the cases went back to clan suspects.
