Essen (dpa / lnw) - The medical director of the Essen University Hospital, Professor Jochen A. Werner, sees health care "massively" impaired because of the strikes that have been going on for ten weeks. Due to the lack of staff and bottlenecks, there are sometimes "acutely threatening situations," said Werner of the German Press Agency.
The Verdi trade union is leading a labor dispute with the employees at six NRW university hospitals in Aachen, Bonn, Cologne, Düsseldorf, Essen and Münster in order to achieve improvements, particularly in care, but also in other hospital areas. At the end of the day, a so-called "collective bargaining agreement" should be agreed, some of which already exist in other parts of Germany.
"I would have wished, especially against the background of an agreement in principle on many factual issues, that Verdi had reduced the intensity of the strike during the ongoing talks, as is usual in many collective bargaining negotiations that are conducted with the firm intention of reaching an agreement," said Werner.
The 63-year-old doctor can "not only understand the demands for relief, but even support them in principle". The heads of the clinic "have long seen an increasing workload, especially in the nursing area on the wards," said Werner. "But you have to also say that an increasing workload is not the privilege of medicine, but a development that has been observed in the entire industry and service sectors for many years. The situation at the airports or in the trades reflects this particularly acutely at the moment."
More than 10,000 operations across North Rhine-Westphalia have already had to be postponed because of the strikes, explained the head of the Essen clinic. The ENT specialist has a hard time predicting when an agreement ready to be signed could be in place: "From a very few days to many weeks."
