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Imminent critical care bed shortage and growing criticism of Spahn
| Reading time: 4 minutes
There is already a threat of a shortage of intensive care beds
The use of intensive care beds is increasing dramatically. Several districts are already occupied. The situation in large cities is of particular concern. The mayor of Berlin, Michael Müller, sounds the alarm.
Not all intensive care beds reported as available in clinics in Germany are actually ready for use. Because specialized personnel are lacking. Now the coalition partner SPD is making serious accusations against the Minister of Health. What failures were there?
reWarnings of an impending shortage of intensive care beds are mounting, and with them, doubts about crisis management from Federal Health Minister Jens Spahn (CDU). But criticism of the hospital operators is also strong.
If a clinic reports a specific number of available intensive care beds, then of course it must also have enough staff, said CDU / CSU parliamentary group health policy spokesperson Karin Maag, WELT. “I wish I could trust the statements.” Hospitals would have to correct their reports immediately if they had ventilators and beds, but not the staff to care for seriously ill Covid 19 patients.
The clinics report free treatment capabilities to the intensive care registry, which is operated by the German Interdisciplinary Association for Intensive and Emergency Medicine (DIVI). The registry’s spokesman, Christian Karagiannidis, cautioned WELT AM SONNTAG to be honest about these reports and warned that Germany had lulled into a false sense of security. Even now, some ER doctors have difficulty locating their patients in clinics, despite the region’s registry showing dozens of free beds. A ventilated Covid-19 patient needs up to five intensive care nurses, but according to DIVI estimates there is a lack of 3,500-4,000 intensive care specialists nationwide.
The vice chairman of the SPD parliamentary group, Bärbel Bas, fears that the already limited resources for care are even more scarce. Because with an increasing number of infections, an increasing number of employees in the healthcare sector would presumably also test positive and not work. The test strategy announced to better protect nurses and risk groups “unfortunately comes too late”, criticized Minister Spahn for the failures of the SPD MP. In some cases, prevention and emergency concepts were still lacking to cushion the staff shortage. According to Bas, this applies not only to hospitals, but also to nursing homes and health authorities, which are reaching their capacity limits across the country.
The left-wing parliamentary group attacks the Minister of Health even more clearly. His health policy spokesman, Achim Kessler, claims to have received information about impending hospital staff shortages weeks ago. That’s why he asked Spahn at the penultimate health committee meeting about the status of the intensive care staff, Kessler said. The minister simply relied on the hospitals to provide the necessary training.
Facts about intensive care beds
“It is nothing new that the federal government is surprised when it comes to fighting the pandemic at the end of summer break or early fall. But the fact that Minister Spahn also ignores serious advice is a new quality, ”says the left-wing MP. It is a “dilettante mistake” that the requirement to report on intensive care beds does not extend to specialized personnel. “Nobody knows how many nurses with intensive care training there really are.” Spahn should immediately ask hospitals for these facts and publish realistic figures on available intensive care beds on this basis. Only on this basis could it be argued whether further measures are necessary to prevent the collapse of the intensive care supply.
Parliamentary group FDP is calling for hospitals to redeploy staff, even beyond their own operations. This is the only way Germany can keep its capacity of intensive care beds above average in a European comparison, says liberal health politician Andrew Ullmann. The university professor and infectious disease specialist blames the federal government that illnesses among older people are on the rise again. “This development should never have happened.” The government had not examined and expanded all health care capabilities for efficiency over the summer.
Mobilize nurses
With a view to the vacant job market, the Greens rely on team solutions in care. Kordula Schulz-Asche, a spokesman for the parliamentary group for geriatric care and policy, suggests that an intensive care worker could not be replaced by a nurse, but could be supported. “It would be absurd if, in the current situation, some specialists were overloaded and other specialists were working for a short time.”
Only the parliamentary group AfD doubts an imminent emergency and warns of an “excessively dangerous actionism”. Health policy spokesman Detlev Spangenberg refers to the “alleged lack of capacity” of the spring, which in reality did not exist. And now, after all, Germany is even treating intensive care patients from abroad or offering adequate support. “The AfD considers any dramatization to be counterproductive.”
The Federal Health Secretariat, meanwhile, refers to the responsibility of clinic operators and states: “We assume that hospitals report beds that can also operate,” said a spokeswoman. Furthermore, it is basically the task of the federal states to control hospital capacities. To delay a potential bottleneck in clinic capabilities for as long as possible, the federal and state governments are currently working on a new concept. It is based on the so-called cloverleaf principle: if beds are scarce, intensive care patients must be distributed between federal states according to a certain principle of distribution, even despite potentially long transport routes. To this end, Germany is divided into five regions in which patient transport will be organized centrally.
