It is only slowly starting up again with physiotherapists, occupational therapists, podiatrists and speech therapists. Healing professionals from Dorfen report.
Dorfen - The corona crisis hit the healthcare professions particularly hard. Because practices for physiotherapy or occupational therapy, but also podiatrists and speech therapists, fell out of the emergency aid package and received no state support. In turn, patients who were urgently in need of health therapy received no treatment either in their practices or at home. As a result, healing processes have often been significantly extended.
Practice "is no longer on sound feet", reports Sabine Heidrich from the Physio-Zentrum Dorfen. "We have been working again since the end of April." Emergency aid for the self-employed was rejected. "We always only invoice the recipes in the following month - and so we were still in good shape when applying, so we fell through the cracks. The loss of earnings does not affect us until June, July. ”
However, this delay was not taken into account, says the physiotherapist, who together with her colleague Alexander Toth has to pay the salary for eleven full-time positions in the two practices in Dorfen and Taufkirchen: "Our employees are still on short-time work."
In the therapy center in Taufkirchen the practice started very well after the opening, in Dorfen the patients came to the treatments only slowly: "Whatever the reason - the Dorfeners are more afraid of an infection with Covid-19." As a physiotherapist you are close to Patients, can't keep their distance.
That was also the problem during the lockdown. "We didn't make home visits." And visual physiotherapy via video chat is hardly possible, if not harmful. "I can not say about video, press the vertebra on the back." However, anyone who had a stroke or a fresh fracture was quickly released from the hospital during the Corona period. "Without subsequent physiotherapy and physiotherapy, healing processes can be prolonged many times over."
The Dorfener occupational therapist Thomas Stürzl was also unable to be there for his patients for many weeks. Many children come to his practice. “The children in Dorfen have not suffered as long as in the big cities,” says Stürzl. The little ones could, for example, be busy in the garden. "We kept in touch by phone, but of course that was no substitute."
Josef Johannes Zitzmann from Erding, who drew attention to the difficult situation in the health and medical professions in a letter to the reader, knows that with increasing age it is urgently necessary to rely on precisely this professional group. "I'm diabetic," says the 69-year-old, "I need my pedicure - I can't help myself".
Michaele Heske
