2024-04-19 13:36:32
The Federal Minister of Health warns of a massive shortage of doctors in the coming years. What’s behind it and what the current situation is.
The most important things at a glance
Federal Health Minister Karl Lauterbach (SPD) has a bleak outlook for health care in the coming years: “We have not trained 50,000 doctors in the last ten years. Therefore, we will be lacking family doctors across the board in the next few years. We will be transformed into a whole “There will be a difficult supply situation,” he said in the ARD “Report from Berlin”. The future shortage “can’t really be imagined yet,” he warned.
One thing is clear: fewer and fewer young people today are choosing to become a family doctor and are instead choosing specialized medical professions. In order to create new incentives for the profession, pay should be improved. Lauterbach is planning a law according to which the upper limits on remuneration (budgeting) will be eliminated and home visits will be better paid. This emerges from the draft of the so-called “Health Care Strengthening Act”.
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Better fees than the solution?
The annoying thing in budgeting so far has been that doctors’ fees have been deducted if they have exceeded their budget because they have to see patients more often or prescribe more medication. This particularly affects practices with many old and/or seriously ill patients.
In some regions, the shortage of doctors is already a reality. However, the problem cannot be reduced exclusively to an urban-rural divide. Antonius Schneider from the Institute for General Medicine at the Technical University of Munich explained on ZDF that it was more a matter of over-, under- and incorrect care. One thing is clear: with 198 patients per doctor, the density of care has never been higher.
But: The doctors are apparently distributed incorrectly. There are many doctors in attractive places – primarily in urban areas – and the care is probably better than ever, says Schneider. In some places there even seem to be too many doctors. According to the expert, this could lead to care being chaotic and less efficient due to a lack of coordination. In unattractive regions, however, there is a risk of a shortage.
A shortage of doctors is not just a problem in rural regions
The map shows that these unattractive regions are not only found in rural areas. Even in socially disadvantaged urban areas, there is already a shortage of general practitioners. It is clear that large parts of eastern Germany are affected by the shortage of doctors, but there are also massive gaps in many regions of the west.
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An additional problem will become apparent in the next few years: Due to demographic change, there are more and more older patients. And more and more older doctors are retiring. This will further aggravate the situation.