The rescue workers in Munich are working at the limit - and are still being insulted for it.
Doctors report shameful scenes in a Munich emergency room.
Munich - Doctors and nurses in the emergency rooms of the clinics need strong nerves - also when dealing with impatient patients and their relatives.
But this case from a clinic in the Munich area makes even experienced employees swell the veins of anger: A group of visitors to the emergency room complained loudly about what they felt was the long waiting time.
Because these people couldn't get there fast enough, they demonstratively ordered pizza by courier and thus converted the waiting area in front of the treatment rooms into a fast-food restaurant.
Right next door in the trauma room, emergency physicians were trying to resuscitate a patient.
"It was a matter of life and death," confirms a doctor involved to our editors.
"If you give everything to save a human life,
Out of frustration over long waiting times: Doctors and nurses are verbally abused
The Monaco pizza scandal is a culmination of a worrying development in emergency rooms.
There has been a practically constant state of emergency for months.
Far too few employees have to take care of too many patients - a consequence of the dramatic shortage of skilled workers, which has been exacerbated by the exhausting Corona crisis.
Doctors and especially nurses are missing everywhere.
This has far-reaching consequences: on the one hand, there are not enough staff in the emergency rooms themselves, and on the other hand, there are not enough hospital beds to be able to transfer the patients to the ward.
For this reason, more and more hospitals are temporarily deregistering their emergency room from the rescue control center.
This leads to massive problems in the distribution of patients.
At the same time, more and more patients and their companions are losing patience when they have to wait long in the emergency room.
Doctors and nurses are sometimes even verbally abused.
Patients leave the emergency room again and call Sanka to get there faster in the fast lane
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Experienced emergency physician: Professor Viktoria Bogner-Flatz, medical director of the rescue service of the City of Munich,
© Münchner Merkur/tz
In order to avoid waiting times, some patients even become downright inventive: "It has often happened that patients have simply disappeared from the emergency room and called Sanka from outside to be admitted and practically in the fast lane to get there faster.
Such attempts are futile, however, because all patients are prioritized according to the severity of their illness or injury," report the medical directors of the Munich rescue service, Professor Viktoria Bogner-Flatz and Dr.
Dominik Hinzmann at the request of Münchner Merkur and tz.
"Many patients just don't want to understand that in the emergency room they are treated according to urgency rather than in the order in which they appear." And the truth also includes:
More and more people go to the emergency room or call the Sanka to avoid having to wait so long for a specialist appointment.
For those with statutory health insurance, the waiting time in Munich is often several months.
In the emergency room, it is hoped that the health problem will be clarified on the same day and, if necessary, treated.
Rescue service bosses: “Lack of skilled workers and beds a serious problem – even in Munich”
This mixed situation puts emergency medicine under additional pressure.
Every year around half a million people are treated as emergencies in the clinics in the Munich area, and almost a third are brought in by Sanka.
Twelve emergency medical teams are deployed, supported by 43 ambulances (RTW) and 34 ambulances.
The rescuers can deliver their patients to 19 acute hospitals.
That's the theory.
But in practice, the rescue managers always have the greatest need to quickly accommodate all patients in a clinic.
Insiders speak of a dramatic systemic crisis.
"When I hear that we in Germany, and especially in Munich, supposedly have too many hospital beds, I would be grateful if someone could show me them," says emergency physician Bogner-Flatz, medical director of the Munich rescue service, in an interview with our editors.
And rescue co-boss Hinzmann adds.
"We are repeatedly faced with massive supply bottlenecks, especially in the area of intensive care medicine and in children - even if the situation in the clinics has eased somewhat compared to the peak phase of the corona pandemic.
This is a serious problem even in a high-performance medical location like Munich.” The current situation is worrying for the employees, but above all for the emergency patients.
"When patients sometimes have to be transported a long way to hospitals that are ready to receive them,
No free bed in Munich: critically ill patient flown to the surrounding clinic
A case from this week shows how dramatic the supply bottleneck is.
Six doctors had to make phone calls for almost an hour and a half to organize free hospital beds for a patient with a severe vascular disease.
Ultimately, the patient was not treated in Munich.
He had to be flown to an Upper Bavarian clinic in a rescue helicopter.