2024-10-01 01:14:29
The family doctor is retiring – what now? More and more German citizens are asking themselves this question. Because often no successor can be found. An expert explains the situation.
The baby boomers are leaving and leaving a gap – including among family doctors. The practices often cannot find a successor. The result: Especially in rural areas, many patients have to travel long distances to receive medical care. This can be hazardous to health and dangerous, warns the Federal Chairman of the General Practitioners Association, Markus Beier, in an interview with t-online.
t-online: Mr. Beier, the shortage of doctors is not a new issue. But now it seems to be getting acute. Also and especially with family doctors.
Markus Beier: The observation is correct. A third of general practitioners are over 60 years old and 15 percent are over 65 years old. So they will all be retiring soon, this is the baby boomer generation. But in fact there aren’t that many people coming anymore. There are already 5,000 open family doctor positions.
The situation is getting worse, especially in rural areas, but also in structurally weak urban districts. Patients there sometimes have to travel long distances to reach a family doctor. In some places, patients can still find a practice that can treat them in acute cases, but no longer have a family doctor’s practice that can look after them. This can have serious consequences for your health.
Many cannot find a successor for their practice?
That’s the way it is. This also has to do with the fact that the job of family doctor is largely less remunerated than, for example, a position as a specialist. The income is usually lower, but the workload is very high. There are also obstacles such as budgeting.
The costs for treatment for those with statutory health insurance have been capped since the 1990s. This can result in doctors receiving almost no money for treating patients at the end of the month because the budget has already been exhausted. You then work practically for free.
This is also a problem for those who take over patients from practices that have closed without successor, right?
They then reach their limits due to the high supply pressure, but also financially, which exacerbates the problem.
But the health minister now wants to overturn the budgeting?
So far these are just announcements, nothing has happened yet.
For many people, their family doctor is more than just their contact for medical matters. You build long-term relationships with him, a special relationship of trust. And when suddenly only two of ten doctors are practicing on site, that is of course worrying.
The entire healthcare system is suffering from the shortage. We know from studies that the loss of a family doctor worsens the care and thus the health of chronically ill people. And emergency services are being used more frequently, which in turn puts a strain on hospitals. Basic medical care is at risk.
Markus Beier is federal chairman of the Association of General Practitioners and General Practitioners.
What mistakes were made in the past that the problem of the shortage of family doctors is now affecting us so heavily?
On the one hand, there are of course purely demographic reasons. The baby boomers are retiring, but doctors are not coming in the same number. But demographics also play a role in other ways. We are getting older and the need for medical care is naturally increasing.
But that was both predictable.
This was known for a long time, politicians did not react. It was simply missed. And too little attention has been paid to the training of general practitioners. The concepts for this have been around for a long time, but have never been implemented.
Some federal states already have a regulation that requires medical students to undertake a country doctor’s position upon matriculation after completing their studies. But of course that doesn’t solve the problem in the short term. What would help in the short term?
There will be no short-term miracle solutions at the push of a button. But there are approaches. I advocate the concept of team practice. This would reduce the workload as the tasks would be distributed among different people.
For example, specially trained medical assistants take on routine tasks such as preliminary examinations, vaccinations, wound care and so on under the roof of the family doctor’s practice. The doctor focuses on the patient and his diagnosis. This distributes the tasks across different shoulders. But it is clear that action must be taken now. Anything else is literally hazardous to health and becomes dangerous.