Of the 110 kids’s hospitals, 43 amenities didn’t have a single mattress left on the traditional ward. There are solely 83 free beds left in pediatric kids’s intensive care models all through Germany! That’s 0.75 free beds per clinic, i.e. lower than one per location.
This is the horrifying results of a present advert hoc survey by the German Interdisciplinary Association for Intensive Care and Emergency Medicine (DIVI). “This is a catastrophic situation, there is no other way to describe it,” mentioned DIVI Secretary General and pediatric intensive care doctor Professor Florian Hoffmann.
At a press convention on the scenario in kids’s intensive care drugs, he subsequently known as on behalf of the affiliation for “the immediate optimization of working conditions in children’s hospitals, the establishment of telemedical networks between the pediatric facilities and the establishment of specialized children’s intensive care transport systems. We have to act now.”
Half of the clinics couldn’t admit sick kids
130 kids’s hospitals had been contacted for the survey, and 110 made their knowledge from the sampling day, November twenty fourth, obtainable. And virtually each second clinic stories that previously 24 hours they’ve been unable to just accept at the least one youngster for pediatric intensive care after a request from the rescue service or emergency room.
Specifically, which means that 46.4 % of the clinics collaborating within the survey needed to reject a complete of 116 small sufferers – in simply in the future.
There had been solely 83 free intensive care beds, i.e. a mean of 0.75 % per clinic. 47 clinics report zero obtainable beds, 44 clinics a free mattress.
“This situation is getting worse from year to year and is carried out on the backs of critically ill children,” says Hoffmann, who can be senior doctor within the interdisciplinary kids’s intensive care unit at Dr. from the Hauner Children’s Hospital of the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich.
All clinics are already collaborating within the nationwide, strategic affected person switch in line with the cloverleaf idea. “Since an increasing number of children have to be transported, sometimes over long distances, we now need the establishment of specialized children’s intensive care transport systems in order to get the children to their destination hospital safely and accompanied by children’s experts,” appeals Prof. Hoffmann.
Aggravated by RSV
Children who’ve been contaminated with the respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) have just lately been admitted to clinics significantly typically, 138 in whole. “The RSV wave continues to build up and necessitates treatment with respiratory support in many children. As of today, we can assume that there are not enough children’s intensive care beds for this treatment,” says Professor Sebastian Brenner, DIVI Congress President and Head of Interdisciplinary Pediatric Intensive Care Medicine within the Department of Neonatology and Pediatric Intensive Care Medicine on the University Children’s Hospital Dresden.
The DIVI numbers show the alarming scenario of the kids’s hospitals in Germany: The 110 reporting homes have a complete of 607 beds that may be arrange, of which solely 367 beds might be operated. The motive for the blocking of 39.5 % of the intensive care beds for youngsters is principally the shortage of employees.
Large clinics significantly affected
The DIVI consultants additionally took a more in-depth have a look at the bigger kids’s hospitals with eight or extra intensive care beds. This features a whole of 32 homes. These reported 363 beds that might be arrange, of which 221 might be operated on the day of the pattern.
Means: 39.1 % of kids’s intensive care beds are closed – a mean of 4.4 beds per intensive care unit! 17 free beds in these 32 clinics imply on common solely 0.5 free beds per clinic.
“When asked about the intensive care capacities, a picture emerges that throughout Germany, regardless of whether north, south, east or west, an average of 40 percent of children’s intensive care beds are closed due to a lack of staff. Around 80 percent of those surveyed lack nursing staff, but there are also a lack of doctors,” summarizes Sebastian Brenner.
In addition to the demand for higher working circumstances within the kids’s clinics, the institution of telemedical networks between the pediatric amenities and the event of kids’s intensive care transport methods, the kids’s intensive care physicians are dedicated to comprehensively together with kids’s rights within the Basic Law. This is the one approach they’d transfer extra into the political and social focus – and solely then may medical take care of the little ones be improved in the long run.
“If all of the aforementioned requirements were met, if the profession of doctors and nurses could be reconciled with family and if the constant stress in the clinics stopped, then we would be able to take care of all seriously ill children with the necessary highest quality of care can,” says Florian Hoffmann.
