Without them, the country would be lost in the corona pandemic - but many nurses in the intensive care units of hospitals are only tired and exhausted after one and a half years of constant stress.
In part, they are now apparently drawing consequences from this, as a flash survey published on Wednesday by the German Hospital Institute on behalf of the German Hospital Association (DKG) showed: The staff shortage in the intensive care units has therefore worsened again in the pandemic.
Britta Beeger
Editor in business.
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In almost three quarters of hospitals with intensive care beds, according to the survey of 233 hospitals, there are currently fewer intensive care staff available than at the end of 2020. The main reasons are layoffs, internal job changes and reduced working hours.
For the first time, the data can also be used to quantify how many intensive care staff were lost in the hospitals due to the difficult conditions in the corona pandemic.
Churn has increased
In a good third of the clinics - calculated in full-time staff - up to 5 percent of the nursing staff are missing, in a further third between 5 and 10 percent. Every eleventh clinic has even lost more than 10 percent of its intensive care staff. Half of the hospitals report that intensive care brain drain has increased compared to previous years.
The figures confirm what experts have long feared: that many intensive care workers have persevered in the pandemic for a while out of a sense of duty to patients and colleagues, but could eventually quit. In particular in the second, severe Corona wave last winter, they not only suffered from the mentally and physically strenuous work, but also in full protective gear. There was also increasing frustration that the working conditions, which were already difficult before Corona, have not changed, even as a result of the great attention in the pandemic. In part, they have now apparently lost confidence that this will ever happen.
The result: Almost nine out of ten hospitals have not been able to occupy some of their intensive care beds since the beginning of the year. A good half of the clinics surveyed stated that this was often or very often the case, with large hospitals with more than 600 beds being particularly badly affected. The situation is also currently tense: More than every second hospital is currently unable to operate intensive care beds due to a lack of nursing or medical staff. The German Interdisciplinary Association for Intensive and Emergency Medicine (Divi) had recently warned that no patient could be treated in every third intensive care bed at the moment.
“By the time of the pandemic at the latest, everyone had to understand that one of the highest bed densities in the world and the most modern medical technology alone cannot care for the sick,” said DKG CEO Gerald Gaß on Wednesday.
Politicians and hospitals should now do everything to make the nursing profession more attractive again.
"That only works with better working conditions and, of course, good salaries that are commensurate with the high level of responsibility and qualifications."
Gaß also emphasized that the current high level of exposure to intensive care units is mainly caused by unvaccinated patients and by vaccination breakthroughs in the elderly.
What is now needed is a campaign for more booster vaccinations and effective steps to increase the vaccination rate.