Many emergency rooms at the limit, ambulances under stress: The Greens are pushing for a comprehensive reform of emergency care and more other offers of help beyond the emergency services. “Nobody calls the emergency number out of boredom or likes to sit for hours in a crowded emergency room,” said health expert Janosch Dahmen of the German Press Agency. “The ambulance service and emergency care are the last safety net of our society, whatever is there.” This applies not only to life-threatening situations, but also when no one else is there. “In the interest of all of us, we must ensure that it does not tear apart from overload in the face of growing challenges.”
Structural problems are currently also encountering record numbers of respiratory diseases, Dahmen made clear. In the rescue service, as in other parts of the healthcare system, demographic development is leading to fewer and fewer specialists and at the same time more and more patients. In addition, there have been more chronic illnesses, loneliness and a lack of social support networks for years. Outpatient offers such as visits to the family doctor and nursing services would also disappear. “The consequence of these developments is not only completely overworked staff, but also an increasing risk to patients.”
Every day, people from retirement and nursing homes are only admitted to hospitals because they cannot be cared for in the facilities due to a lack of staff or qualified help. People with acute mental illnesses would be pushed back and forth between the responsibilities of the emergency services, outpatient facilities and the clinic. “Some people who live in homelessness and need a warm place to sleep, something to eat or an open ear rather than blue lights and a siren must – in order not to become an emergency due to cold, hunger and loneliness – still be cared for by the rescue service in the absence of other help .”
The reform of emergency care will be a central project of the traffic light coalition 2023, said the health policy spokesman for the Greens. It is time to link the emergency number 112 and the medical on-call hotline 116 117 more closely. It is also important to expand telemedical advice in the control centers and, in addition to ambulances, also have crisis services or emergency care available. “In emergency rooms, we should constantly run outpatient emergency practices through the associations of statutory health insurance physicians,” said Dahmen, who worked as a senior physician in the rescue service in Berlin.
A commission of experts on the clinics set up by Federal Minister of Health Karl Lauterbach (SPD) is also to develop recommendations for a reform of emergency care, as the department announced. The focus is on greater digitization and networking of all those involved, as well as standardized initial assessments of which facilities patients should best be directed to. Dahmen said that the emergency services had to be financed in such a way that not only transport to the hospital was possible – but also final qualified care directly at the scene of the emergency.
Rescue service representatives have been warning of a collapse for some time and are calling for rapid action to be taken to prevent overwork and staff shortages. In mid-December, an “alliance for rescue services” to which several organizations belong warned that there was a risk that the system would collapse. The rescue service is efficient, but is increasingly reaching its limits. These are often trivial cases, but more staff for more operations is not available. The Verdi union wants to achieve a reduction in the maximum weekly working time to 44 hours in collective bargaining for employees in the municipal rescue service. Excessive working hours of up to 48 hours lead to health problems and should be a thing of the past.
