The cost pressure in clinics is increasing and patients often receive certain therapies for purely economic reasons. Against this "dictates of the economy in our hospitals" 215 physicians brace themselves in the current issue of the magazine "Stern". Together with 30 organizations, the doctors appeal to the Federal Government: "The state must create the framework conditions that ensure the human right to health care." The leadership of a clinic belongs in the hands of "people who consider the patient's welfare as the most important goal".
Background of the call is the concern of many doctors, the patient despite high-performance medicine not good care and also no longer able to guarantee their safety. It has long been known that the emergency rooms are overcrowded and doctors too often resort to a scalpel.
But the problem remains: In many hospitals, economists not only run the company, but as commercial directors, they are also superior to the medical directors. Thus the profit too often stands over a meaningful, good and lasting supply of the patients. (Read here about Asklepios clinics: "The sick group").
How money influences the therapy decision
According to the report, many doctors blame another problem for the abuses: the case lump sums introduced 16 years ago. This compensation system provides for hospitals to be paid for services provided. The more benefits, the more money. In addition to the quantity, the quality is also measured and the examinations and therapies rewarded differently. This in turn influences the therapy decision.
The internist Arndt Dohmen describes the disincentives in the "star" on the example of a diabetic who is threatened with amputation due to open wounds on the soles of his feet. "In the case flat rate system, the complex conservative treatment can be badly charged, there are about 3000 euros," said Dohmen. "Simply cut off, drastically speaking, is considerably more lucrative with more than 10,000 euros."
The doctors do not want to accept these abuses any longer. Your demands :
- The case flat rate system must be replaced or reformed
- The economically controlled overtreatment and undersupply of patients had to be stopped
- The state must plan and equip hospitals better
The appeal of the doctors joins a chain of initiatives and surveys that deal with the problem of cost pressures in German hospitals. Thus, the German Ethics Council had already criticized in 2016 that the patient's welfare will be saved. The physician Karl-Heinz Wehkamp stated in 2017 after the publication of the results of a medical survey: "A risk to patients is accepted." And a young physician reported in SPIEGEL in 2018 why, after a year's work in a clinic, she asked herself disillusioned, "What kind of doctor did I become?"
