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Sunday, December 06, 2020
Hardly any increase in staff
RKI’s IT department remains understaffed
Reports by fax and paperwork threaten to burden health authorities even with a small number of cases. The IT department at the Robert Koch Institute has also been ill-equipped for years. That takes revenge for the pandemic. The institute still has only four new positions.
SPD health expert Karl Lauterbach has called for a staff increase at the Robert Koch Institute (RKI), which was particularly stressed during the Corona crisis. Specifically, it is the IT department, as Lauterbach told “Welt am Sonntag”. According to the newspaper, the Bundestag budget committee only approved 4 new posts for the IT department at the end of November, out of the 68 that the institute requested. In doing so, the committee approved a draft of the black and red federal government.
Lauterbach told the newspaper: “RKI’s personnel budget for IT tasks must be increased immediately.” Otherwise, the RKI would not be able to accomplish its many tasks quickly enough. “We really can’t afford to save here right now.”
A spokeswoman for the Federal Ministry of Health did not comment on the specific number of jobs mentioned in the report. However, he announced that his ministry had conducted repeated campaigns to strengthen RKI’s IT team. “Where it was not possible to store this through permanent positions, in its place considerable financial resources have flowed in part, for example to commission third parties and buy the corresponding services on the market.”
Like Lauterbach, the chairman of the FDP in the Bundestag health committee, Andrew Ullmann, also spoke out. The pandemic shows that the institute’s IT department has been under-equipped for years. “Now we will get the receipt for the pandemic,” Ullmann told the newspaper. Fax reports, telephone quarantine checks and paperwork are responsible for threatening health authorities with overload even with a comparatively low number of cases.
