About 5,000 general practitioners (GPs) are missing in prosperous Germany, and according to the forecast of the weekly Die Zeit, the situation will worsen sharply in the coming years, because more than 40% of the current practicing doctors are over 60 years old. The average age of all jeeps is now quite a bit below this limit.
“On the horizon is a picture in which offices are no longer accepting new patients and waiting lists are getting longer and longer,” the weekly wrote. Not to mention that the number of doctor’s offices is also melting – between 2012 and 2022 it has decreased by 7.6%. The same number 7.6 marks another alarming trend: the examination of one patient now lasts an average of 7.6 minutes – far too little time for serious medical work.
Limited health budgets and other absurdities
In Germany, there are plenty of cardiology and radiology specialists who earn excellent money, but on the other hand, the shortage of doctors who take care of people’s everyday ailments is felt more and more acutely. General practitioners, who treat all kinds of pain, high blood pressure or the flu, sometimes work 60 hours a week, and often it turns out that their work is even free.
And this is one of the absurdities of the German health system. Health funds impose limits on the frequency with which the same patient can be treated within a month. And if this “budget” is exhausted, the patient no longer has the right to treatment, but the jeeps nevertheless fulfill their humanitarian duty – and treat. That’s why Health Minister Karl Lauterbach wants to change the payment system for GPs and cut the red tape that has bogged down GPs.
Not only the triple coalition in Berlin shares the health minister’s views – the opposition is also sounding the alarm over the shortage of doctors. A few days ago, the CDU submitted its ideas for solving the problem. The Christian Democrats believe that the country needs a national plan to open more places for medical students in universities and to reduce the too high success requirements for prospective students.
Foreign footage
Daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAC) also wrote that the problem is getting worse and the country needs more medical students. In 2022, 421,303 doctors were registered in Germany, but according to forecasts, by 2030 the shortage of doctors will reach an incredible number of 200,000, with a total shortage of personnel in the medical sector amounting to one million.
The newspaper cited Venezuelan doctor Anieli Bru Perez, who founded an intermediary agency to attract Latin American doctors. She claims that up to 100,000 doctors from Latin America can work in Germany in 10 years. “It won’t solve the problem, but hopefully it will at least prevent the worst,” Perez says. The Venezuelan doctor explains why her colleagues from Latin America face difficulties in Germany. First of all, they have to know or quickly learn German, and they are also forced to overcome various bureaucratic obstacles. For doctors with a diploma issued outside the EU, equivalence is required, also related to additional exams in the specialty.
Doctors from Bulgaria
Many Bulgarian doctors also work in Germany. With the exception of German language proficiency, the other requirements do not apply to them when they start working in Germany. According to the statistics of the Federal Chamber of Doctors from 2020, 1,883 doctors from Bulgaria worked in the country, of which 1,400 – in hospitals. The statistics show that only four other EU countries were represented with more medicine than Germany – these are Greece, Romania, Poland and Austria.
According to statistics from last year, the starting gross salary of an assistant in a communal clinic in Germany amounts to around 4,600 euros, and the average doctor’s salary is around 7,462 euros gross, with large differences depending on the specialty, whether the doctor works in a university clinic, community hospital, medical health center or other place, as well as by experience and position in the hierarchy.
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2024-01-26 11:10:00
#absurdity #Germany #doctors #incomes
