After a controversial debate, the district council set the course for the future of hospitals with a large majority - with far-reaching consequences for today's locations.
District
- The administration should examine the extent to which the new building of a central hospital with a medical campus in the district can be realized.
For this purpose, a draft plan for the new building should be commissioned, a suitable construction site should be sought and a financing plan should be drawn up before the district council should make a final decision.
Should the new building actually be realized, that would mean that the hospital in Weilheim would then be completely closed.
In Schongau there would also be no more inpatient care, only an outpatient center is to be established and the existing nursing school is to be significantly expanded.
Medical director: "The situation is serious and the employees now want a decision on how to proceed."
Hospital expert Prof. Norbert Roeder had initially made it clear that the continued existence of the hospital in Schongau in particular was in acute danger.
There are already no more doctors who want to work there *.
Roeder ended his lecture with a dramatic appeal: “Other districts are also on this path and want money from the Free State of Bavaria.
Therefore, you need to act quickly.
Waiting will weaken medical care in the district ”.
The new Medical Director of the Schongau Hospital, Prof. Reinhold Lang, put it in a similarly dramatic way: “This weekend, due to the sick leave, we will have massive problems being able to maintain operations at the Schongau Hospital at the usual quality.
The situation is serious and the employees now want a decision on how to proceed. "
District councils want debate on the future of hospitals in the Weilheim-Schongau district
However, some of the district councilors saw it very differently and pleaded for the debate to be postponed - just as the demonstrators from the action alliance for the preservation of the Schongau hospital in front of the entrance to the Tiefstollenhalle had demanded. It was emphasized again and again that the district councils had only had the report two days ago, and that there was no time to deal intensively with it. Even without a decision, one could ask the state whether funds would flow at all. Hans Schütz (Greens / Peiting) also criticized the fact that a number of district councils would be missing. "How are we supposed to explain to the electorate that we made such a far-reaching decision, although 14 district councilors were missing and half of those present did not know the report?"
Peter Ostenrieder (CSU / Peiting) tried to make the debate more objective: “What we are deciding today is nothing more and nothing less than an audit assignment. We just put the train on the track. ”This is not a final decision for or against a central hospital or a specific location. In addition, the expert opinion was discussed in detail in the closed meeting, and everyone received a copy before the meeting and could read it: "Nobody here can pretend that they do not know what is being voted on here," said Ostenrieder.
Michael Asam (SPD / Peiting), as the hospital supervisory board, went on a collision course with his own parliamentary group colleagues: "The supervisory board, in which almost all parties represented in the district council work, have unanimously agreed to start investigating and planning now." He recalled because the unsettled staff await a decision.
Controversial point: the future of the Schongau hospital location
Another central point of contention emerged as the future of the hospital location in Schongau. A number of district councils did not want to accept the fact that in the future primarily outpatient interventions should be carried out here. Although the expert Roeder emphasized several times that it was a matter of saving the Schongau site at all, Hans Schütz, among others, demanded "that Schongau be given equal consideration when choosing the location for the new central hospital". Falk Sluyterman (SPD / Schongau) calculated that “an assistant doctor who lives in Großhadern only drives 14 minutes longer to Schongau than to Weilheim. And hopefully the train connection will also be better soon. "
In the meantime, not a word was said about the fact that after the opening of the central hospital, Weilheim might no longer have its own hospital.
In the end, it was decided that the location question should first be ignored and first examined to what extent the Free State would be willing to finance a new building at all.
And how much funding that went into the renovation of Weilheim and Schongau has to be paid back.
In the future, the current developments in the district council will be reported regularly and publicly, it said.
* You can read all the details about the hospital report in the print weekend edition of Schongauer Nachrichten, Weilheimer Tagblatt and Penzberger Merkur.
