The proliferation of the omicron variant is exacerbating the shortage of staff in hospitals in Germany.

In a recent lightning survey by the German Hospital Society (DKG), which is available to the FAZ in advance, almost three quarters of the clinics report higher staff shortages than is usual at this time of year.

In more than every tenth hospital, the staff shortages are even significantly higher.

In numbers, this means that more than 20 percent more employees fell ill than usual in winter.

Britta Beeger

Editor in Business.

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The sick leave among the nursing staff, who are already heavily burdened in the corona pandemic, is particularly high.

Every fifth hospital stated that there were significantly more nursing staff, i.e. more than 20 percent, sick than usual at this time of year.

In more than half of the hospitals it was between 5 and 20 percent more (see chart).

The situation is less tense among doctors and in areas that are not related to patients, such as administration and housekeeping.

For the survey, the German Hospital Institute, on behalf of the DKG, interviewed a representative sample of 246 hospitals in Germany with at least 50 beds in the middle of the week. 


The staff shortages are “currently a much bigger problem than in normal years,” said the CEO of the DKG, Gerald Gaß.

Supply probably not yet endangered

"This shows that we have to relieve the remaining staff in patient treatment as much as possible in order to be able to maintain the care." a similar picture emerges in the intensive care units.

For patients, this can mean that – as in previous corona waves – planned operations such as knee or hip operations, and in the worst case cancer operations, have to be postponed.

The survey does not show how many beds cannot be occupied due to the bottlenecks.

Basically, the supply does not seem to be endangered, also because the severity of the diseases in the omicron wave has so far been limited: the number of corona patients in the intensive care units has been falling since mid-December.

As can also be seen from figures from the DKG, this week in Germany there was an increase in normal wards for the first time since the beginning of December.

There was a particularly strong increase in corona patients in federal states with high incidences such as Schleswig-Holstein, NRW, Hesse and Hamburg, while the numbers in other regions are currently still declining.

"Bureaucracy Lockdown"

However, that could change soon if the number of infections continues to increase and more older people fall ill with Covid-19 again. Federal Health Minister Karl Lauterbach (SPD) expects that there will be at least 400,000 new corona infections a day in Germany in mid-February, and hospitals are also preparing for a significantly increasing number of hospital admissions, both in intensive care and in normal wards (FAZ of January 18). As it became known on Friday, so-called planned hospitals in Berlin, which are not emergency hospitals, are now being more involved in the care of corona patients via certain occupancy rates. The aim is to create additional capacities to secure the supply, said a spokeswoman.

In addition, in this phase of the corona pandemic, it must be carefully examined which cases need to be treated on an outpatient basis, which in the hospital and which in the intensive care unit, which requires good interaction between resident doctors and clinics.

DKG boss Gaß called for a “bureaucracy lockdown” in which all documentation work that is not medically and nursingly necessary is dispensed with.

"The employees belong at the bedside, with the patients, and not at the desks or in examinations of the medical service."