Suddenly the demand for flower vases is great again.

With the return of the visitors to the hospital wards, the vases that have been gathering dust in the cupboards over the past few months are also dug out again.

During the pandemic-related ban on visits, they were in little demand.

More than two years after the outbreak of the pandemic, the clinics are increasingly succeeding in establishing a new everyday life with Corona.

This includes the return of visitors - but also adhering to the mask requirement.

Marie Lisa Kehler

Deputy head of the regional section of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.

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Many houses are currently fighting the great shortage of staff more than ever.

Many vacancies remain unfilled.

A long-term problem.

Many nursing staff are absent at short notice due to illness.

Because they are also affected by quarantine and isolation rules.

Additional corona infection

Sigrid Kuptschitsch, Director of Nursing at the Bethanien Hospital, does not want to sue.

She says that lamenting has never improved a situation.

That's why she focuses on what's going well.

"It was a stressful situation and it took a lot of effort to accompany both the relatives and the patients throughout the stay," she says.

In her view, banning visits for longer would simply have been “ethically unacceptable”.

Kuptschitsch is not only the nursing director at the Bethanien Hospital, but also the spokeswoman for the nursing directorate at the Agaplesion Frankfurt Diakonie Kliniken, which also includes the Markus Hospital.

Two clinics that were involved in the care of corona patients in completely different ways.

While the Markus Hospital treats corona patients who require intensive care and ventilation, among other things, the Bethanien Hospital has focused on the care of patients who have to be admitted to the hospital regularly.

One focus of the Bethanien Hospital is emergency cardiological care.

These patients also came and often come to the house with an additional corona infection.

Only this is not the main reason for the hospital stay,

"A crisis-proof profession"

The strict corona hygiene regulations that apply in both houses are the same regardless of the different priorities, explains the nursing director.

After two years of the pandemic, however, routine in dealing with the changed work processes has also returned.

And this in turn gives security.

The 59-year-old Director of Nursing no longer wants to see the image of "deplorable care" drawn.

Rather, she sees the past two years as an opportunity to once again clearly emphasize the advantages of the profession.

Short-time work has never existed in nursing.

"It's a crisis-proof job," she says.

In addition, nursing offers many career and further training opportunities like hardly any other profession.

Nevertheless, according to Kuptschitsch, the Corona crisis has once again clearly shown that the framework conditions for nursing staff must be improved in order to attract more people to the profession and keep them in the profession.

"But the framework conditions will automatically improve if we have more people in care." The Frankfurt Diakoniekliniken operate their own training center in order to meet the requirement to train more themselves.

Recruiting junior staff is currently one of the biggest challenges, as Kuptschitsch says.

"In Frankfurt alone, 16 hospitals are fishing in an empty tank".