According to media reports, 17 emergency practices in Baden-Württemberg are to be closed, and the Stuttgart region is also affected. What consequences could this have for patients?
Severe pain or injuries but no need for emergency services? In such cases, emergency practices are available in many places. But now 17 of these contact points in Baden-Württemberg are apparently to be closed, as SWR reports. After several emergency practices have already been closed in recent years, the Baden-Württemberg Association of Statutory Health Insurance Physicians (KVBW) is now apparently planning to continue with this.
A list of affected practices should include, for example, Backnang (Rems-Murr district), Herrenberg (Böblingen district) and Kirchheim Teck (Esslingen district). The KVBW press spokesman does not yet want to officially confirm the details. The locations will not be announced until Monday.
The debate is still raging. In many places, mayors and members of the state parliament are speaking out. Backnang’s mayor, Maximilian Friedrich, among others, criticized the plans: “Medical care should not be a question of where you live,” said Friedrich. He called on the population to contact the Association of Statutory Health Insurance Physicians and politicians to make it clear how important the on-site medical service is. The local hospital was closed just a few years ago, and now the emergency practice is also set to close.
The problem is not a local one; medical care is increasingly being organized more centrally. Particularly in rural parts of the country, travel distances to doctors on call are likely to become longer. Experts fear that this could worsen the situation in emergency rooms.
The background is a new planning of the medical on-call services. According to the reports, the goal should be for 95 percent of the population to be able to reach the remaining emergency doctor’s offices within a 30-minute drive, while the maximum drive time for the rest is 45 minutes.
A doctor talks about the background
It is difficult to question affected doctors in the debate; they are apparently encouraged to wait for the KVBW to be published. “We have been banned from speaking,” is how Jürgen Nüßle, a general practitioner from Herrenberg in the Böblingen district, puts it.
It has been known for a long time that there will probably be fewer emergency practices in the future, but which ones are specifically affected is not yet official. Nüßle coordinates the emergency medical service in Herrenberg; according to media reports, this contact point will also be affected by the cancellation. He wasn’t allowed to say whether that was true.
However, doctor Nüßle tries to address the background to the debate: “The burden on individual doctors is high and there is a great shortage of staff. Reducing them is therefore a good idea, the question is how supply is ensured,” said the doctor.
He assumes that more telemedicine – such as consultations via smartphone – will be used in the future in order to conserve resources. However, there is little experience with this so far.
A press spokeswoman in the Baden-Württemberg Ministry of Social Affairs underlines his statement: “The principle applies to the future of medical care: digital before outpatient before inpatient. We will all have to get used to that.” Resources must be used precisely, she explains.
Social Minister Manfred Lucha (Greens) apparently wants to discuss the issue in the Social Committee next week. However, his press spokeswoman is already trying to dampen expectations and points out that the federal states only have a few options and there are no concrete guidelines for the accessibility of on-call practices. “Emergency care in Baden-Württemberg is guaranteed,” she explains.
Hauk speaks of “broken savings”
Agriculture Minister Peter Hauk expressed himself less diplomatically and much more critically: “For me, further ruinous savings and a further deterioration in medical care in rural areas is out of the question and unacceptable,” emphasized the conservative.
Baden-Württemberg’s Minister of Social Affairs Manfred Lucha has not yet commented personally on the topic. There is criticism of this from the opposition: “It cannot be the case that the responsible health minister, Lucha, has said nothing about the threatened closures for days. The minister has barricaded himself in and has left the entire country in the dark for days,” said Social Democrat Florian Wahl, health spokesman for the SPD parliamentary group in the state parliament.
