Lauterbach: Bonus for nurses
Created: 02/22/2022Updated: 02/22/2022, 16:23
A corona intensive care unit.
© Sebastian Gollnow/dpa
After long discussions, nurses should now receive financial recognition for many hard corona months.
However, there are still no signs of acute relief in everyday crisis life.
Berlin - The promised corona bonus of one billion euros for high burdens in the pandemic is to be given to nurses in clinics and care facilities.
Half of the payments should be distributed, as Federal Health Minister Karl Lauterbach (SPD) made clear on ZDF.
“The bonus comes relatively quickly now.
But that is not all, the working conditions must improve overall.” The clinics still do not see the peak of the acute burden in the current wave with the virus variant Omicron.
The traffic light coalition of SPD, Greens and FDP had announced that there should be a bonus for nursing staff.
The government wants to provide one billion euros for this and raise the tax exemption for bonus payments to 3,000 euros.
Lauterbach said that a corresponding draft had now been developed and should be submitted to the Bundestag.
The bonus should go to the nurses because they were the focus of the Corona crisis.
Who can count on bonus payments?
The newspapers of the Funke media group reported that a key issues paper provides for a bonus of up to 550 euros for full-time employees in geriatric care.
The staggered bonus should be paid out from June 30th and no later than December 31st.
For clinic nurses, a bonus is planned for those hospitals that treated more than ten Covid cases with artificial respiration in 2021.
These are 837 clinics that take care of 95 percent of all corona patients.
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Hospital operators and employee representatives should decide together who will receive premiums and how much.
The bonus should primarily be aimed at workers in bedside care.
According to this, around 280,000 nurses could get money.
With a view to the Corona situation, the Vice Chairman of the Board of the German Hospital Society, Andreas Wagener, told the "Rheinische Post": "The apex of the omicron load in the hospitals has not yet been fully reached." with the dynamics weakening.
The number of cases is increasing, especially in normal wards.
The occupancy of the intensive care units is currently stable.
According to the Robert Koch Institute (RKI), the seven-day incidence fell further to 1306.8 reported new infections per 100,000 inhabitants (previous day 1346.8, a week ago 1437.5).
The health authorities now reported 125,902 new cases in one day, fewer than a week ago.
However, more deaths were registered within 24 hours: 306.
The importance of the PCR test
The Association of Accredited Laboratories in Medicine expressed concern that too many sick people could no longer be tested using more accurate PCR laboratory tests.
Only PCR-confirmed cases are included in the official statistics - if fewer infections are clarified via PCR, values such as the seven-day incidence are lower.
The background to the fear is ALM data, according to which there was a “noticeable relaxation” in many laboratories in the past week.
The organization gave the occupancy rate as a national average at 73 percent, after 86 and 93 percent in the previous weeks.
A good two million PCR tests were carried out, of which a further high proportion of almost half were positive (previous week: around 2.3 million tests).
The declining number of PCR tests does not mean any relaxation in the pandemic situation.
dpa
