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Thousands of care positions are already vacant - and according to a study, the bottlenecks in care in Germany threaten to worsen.
By 2030, around 182,000 additional workers are expected to be required, as calculations for the current nursing care report by the Barmer health insurance company have shown.
The background to this is that the number of people in need of care is likely to rise from the current 4.5 million to around six million by 2030.
"Thousands of nurses and basic concepts of where these people should come from are already missing," said Treasurer Christoph Straub.
He warned that Germany was well on the way to falling into a precarious nursing emergency.
In order to avert this, the future federal government must, among other things, make training more attractive.
In order to avoid excessive financial demands on those in need of care, the benefit amounts for long-term care insurance should be increased once and then dynamized on a regular basis.
Financial requirements of 59 billion euros in 2030
So far, the federal government has been trying to improve the situation of care workers in Germany with a “concerted care campaign”. The initiative "Immediate Care Program" initiated in it has so far not been as successful as hoped. In the corona pandemic in particular, many nurses are struggling with their job, but the great "Pflexit", i.e. the flight of employees from the care industry, has so far not taken place. The Federal Employment Agency was initially only able to determine a seasonal decline that occurs every year - for example due to the end of apprenticeships.
The new nursing report leaves no doubt that this situation is likely to worsen with the additional burden caused by the corona crisis.
The new forecast figures for the number of people in need of care are well above previous estimates, which assume five million people by 2030, it said for explanation.
In the analysis by Heinz Rothgang from the Research Center for Inequality and Social Policy at the University of Bremen, calculations were made for the first time that did not take into account a stable but an initially still increasing proportion of those in need of care among the insured.
Accordingly, the financial requirements for care should also increase.
According to the calculations, it should grow from 49 billion euros at the end of 2020 to 59 billion euros by 2030 without further performance improvements.
apr / dpa
