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Sunday, December 06, 2020
Lack of qualified personnel
Hospitals groan under the second wave
Currently, there are 40 percent more intensive care patients in hospitals in Germany than in the spring. Some have exceeded their capacity limit. The limiting factor is not the available beds.
Germany’s hospitals are reaching their limits in the face of increasing contamination from the corona pandemic. “In individual countries like Saxony, the number of intensive care patients is five times higher than in April. Clinics there are reaching their capacity limits or have already exceeded them,” said Gerald Gaß, president of the German Hospital Society ( DKG), in the “Welt am Sonntag”.
According to the DKG, according to the report, there are currently 40 percent more Covid 19 intensive care patients in the ward than during the first wave of the pandemic in the spring. Also, there would be around 16,000 Covid 19 cases that would be treated in normal rooms. “These have a significantly higher cost of care than other patients,” Gass said.
In the spring, according to the report, smaller and less-equipped clinics could have easily referred their seriously ill Covid 19 patients to top-of-the-line providers such as university hospitals. Now, in some regions, these would approach the load limit.
“We can still receive patients from the smaller hospitals,” Gernot Marx of Aachen University Hospital told the newspaper. However, hospital staff “have to work hard, especially because we want to continue caring for other patients.” In view of staff shortages, caring for these patients is becoming increasingly difficult. “It is not the intensive care beds that are limiting, but the properly qualified staff,” Marx warned.
Criticism that the clinics would dramatize the situation to force financial aid was rejected by DKG president Gaß. The reintroduction of the so-called free maintenance flat rates for intensive care beds for January is the right step, but will only be of effective help for some clinics due to “very restrictive allocation criteria”. However, many more hospitals would have to restrict their standard care due to Covid-19, which threatened liquidity problems.
