The children's hospitals in Germany are at the limit. Doctors and nursing staff can hardly keep up with the treatments for the little patients, and medicine is also scarce. In order to nevertheless guarantee acute care, the Greens are calling for a four-point crisis plan.
According to a report by "Spiegel", the Greens are demanding a number of immediate measures from Federal Health Minister Karl Lauterbach to counter the lack of medicines and treatment options for children. In a four-point crisis plan, they demand, for example, that pharmacies be allowed to produce missing medication for the treatment of acute respiratory diseases independently and without a new prescription from the doctor treating them.
They should also be able to dispense alternative products without having to issue a new prescription. In addition, wholesalers should be obliged to stock all medicines that are on the World Health Organization's list of essential medicines, the magazine reported.
In the meantime, according to the German Red Cross (DRK), there is increasing hostility or even assaults against the employees there due to the overload, especially of children's clinics. "There are increasing cases of threats or the actual exercise of psychological and physical violence against health workers," said DRK President Gerda Hasselfeldt of the "Rheinische Post" on Saturday.
The chairman of the German Hospital Society (DKG), Gerald Gass, also classified the situation in the children's hospitals as continuing to be difficult. "Nursing staff from the adult wards can only alleviate the bottlenecks in the children's wards to a limited extent, since highly specialized professionals work in their area in pediatrics," Gass told the "Rheinische Post". Nevertheless, the hospitals tried to organize such shifts.
The intensive care doctor Christian Karagiannidis told the Berlin “tageszeitung” that he also considered the expected burdens on the health system in the coming years due to the lack of skilled workers to be greater than the corona pandemic. "The pandemic wasn't pretty, but compared to what's in store for us in the next ten years, this was the much smaller problem."
Karagiannidis therefore pushed for massive immigration. "We will lose around 500,000 employees who retire in all professional groups every year," warned the President of the German Society for Internal Intensive Care Medicine and Emergency Medicine (DIVI). Millions of jobs could not be filled because of this. "These workers are missing as care workers, they are missing as contributors - that is still completely underestimated," said Karagiannidis. If something is not done now, "the health system will crash".
