On Tuesday, the German Hospital Association (DKG) warned that increasingly more hospitals will not have the ability to bear the monetary burden and can slide into insolvency subsequent yr primarily as a result of power disaster and excessive inflation.
“A wave of insolvencies is rolling toward our hospitals in 2023 that can hardly be stopped,” Gerald Gass, the group’s chairperson, advised native media, including that the federal government’s monetary support plan has been inadequate.
The harm to medical care will probably be seen in lots of areas in 2023, Gass stated, referring to the present hospital barometer of the German Hospital Institute (DKI), an annual consultant survey of normal hospitals in Germany.
According to the annual survey, 59% of the hospitals count on large monetary losses this yr, and they’re already working on damaging margins. In 2021, this share was 43%.
Meanwhile, the proportion of hospitals with a optimistic annual outcome will greater than halve, from 44% to an anticipated 20%, in accordance with the DKI survey. Currently, solely 21% of hospitals hope for a balanced outcome for the 2022 monetary yr.
For 2023, 56% count on an additional deterioration of the financial scenario. Only 17% of hospitals count on an enchancment and 27% foresee no change when in comparison with the scenario proper now.
Gass sees the monetary support deliberate by the federal authorities to compensate for power value will increase as useful. However, the help seems non-sufficient to sort out inflation-related normal price will increase.
In an announcement given to news outlet RedaktionsNetzwerk Deutschland (RND), Bavaria’s Health Minister Karl Lauterbach stated that “medicine has priority over the economy, but this remains an empty promise.”
“I have been warning for weeks that the support promised so far by the federal government is not enough to absorb, for example, the massive increase in material costs for hospitals.”
According to the survey, the staffing scenario in hospitals, particularly nursing, continues to be a trigger for concern.
At midyear 2022, virtually 90% of hospitals had issues filling vacant nursing positions within the normal wards. Compared to the earlier yr, the variety of vacant nursing positions within the normal controls rose from 14,400 to twenty,600.
According to German Hospital Federation estimates, hospitals want round 15 billion euros ($16 billion) in monetary help to beat the present disaster.
