Nursing emergency: Unterallgäu District Administrator Eder turns to Annalena Baerbock

Created: 2022-10-21 09:07

Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock will soon receive mail from the Unterallgäu on the subject of a shortage of nursing staff.

© IMAGO/Christian Spicker

Unterallgäu – It should be made easier for nursing staff from abroad to work in Germany.

Their qualifications should also be recognized quickly and easily.

In the eyes of the Lower Allgäu District Administrator Alex Eder, these are important steps towards improving the personnel situation in nursing.

He wrote to Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock. 

In his letter, Eder describes examples, for example of two Kosovan nurses who have been waiting for an appointment for a work visa at the German embassy in Pristina for almost two years.

"We urgently need these workers for our nursing services, nursing homes and hospitals (...) due to the sometimes almost endless waiting time for an appointment, this opportunity is jeopardized and at least valuable time is lost," he writes.

The advertised, so-called "accelerated skilled workers procedure" is also hardly applicable in many cases, since the qualification required for the German labor market is almost unattainable abroad.

Eder therefore asked Foreign Minister Baerbock to address this issue and to equip and organize the German embassies accordingly.

"Especially the group of nursing professions has done the incredible in the time of additional extreme stress in the past two years and is urgently in need of reinforcement," Eder explains his concerns.