2024-08-13 13:21:53
The National Association of Statutory Health Insurance Physicians complains about increased aggression in doctors’ offices and calls for better protection. A family doctor describes the measures he is taking.
Are things becoming increasingly violent in doctor’s offices? This is the complaint of the head of the National Association of Statutory Health Insurance Physicians (KBV), Andreas Gassen. “Open aggression and extremely demanding behavior have increased significantly. The situation is escalating more and more often, not only in emergency rooms, but also in private practices,” he told the “Neue Osnabrücker Zeitung”. A family doctor from the Ruhr area (Name and practice are known to the editors) confirmed in an interview with t-online: The patients in the practices are becoming more and more aggressive.
“We have had several incidents in our practice in the past. One of them was patients who were under the influence of drugs. Here we once had an incident with a patient who was carrying a long knife – the situation threatened to escalate.” A police operation lasting several hours brought the practice to a standstill, and waiting patients could not be treated.
In another case, a patient suffered from paranoid schizophrenia (read what that is here): “In an acute psychosis, he harassed us for several months with stalking emails, photos, insults, verbal outbursts and pictures with guns.”
These are extreme cases that fortunately do not occur every day. But even in everyday life, patients can be felt to be irritable, says the doctor: Patients often misjudge the priority of their own treatment – in the doctor’s opinion, usually too high. “Some patients come to the practice and openly threaten to leave a negative review on Google or Jameda if they do not receive a prescription or a sick note,” he says.
In addition, there are service cuts and restrictions in the contribution-financed health system. “As doctors, we are increasingly being seen as unintentionally denying people’s wishes,” he says. When patients’ demands for certain treatment methods or medications are then denied, aggressive behavior is now occurring in large numbers.
The family doctor is therefore on the side of KBV boss Gassen, who is calling for significant penalties – and a tightening of criminal law, including in relation to doctor’s practices. “Practices don’t have to put up with everything either,” says Gassen.
The general practitioner’s new practice in the Ruhr area has already taken precautions: “Each of our consulting rooms is equipped with a panic button like in a bank, so that in an emergency we can quietly and quietly trigger an emergency call to the police directly under the desk,” says the general practitioner. But he is planning even more measures, such as self-defense and de-escalation courses for his practice staff. Panic rooms for employees are also conceivable: “In the event of an escalation, they could retreat there.”