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Stuttgart / Mainz / Saarbrücken (dpa) - Baden-Württemberg, Rhineland-Palatinate, Saarland and the French border region Grand Est want to work more closely on cross-border healthcare.

After the first wave of the corona pandemic in spring, the idea for a mutual assistance pact arose, said the Prime Minister of Baden-Württemberg Winfried Kretschmann (Greens) on the occasion of the signing of the agreement in a video conference on Friday.

"With the assistance pact, we want to ensure that we can help quickly and unbureaucratically in such emergency situations in the future."

The aim is therefore both to improve cross-border communication and to enable the shared use of infrastructures.

The Rhineland-Palatinate head of government Malu Dreyer (SPD) said that it was not just about an overview of bed capacities, but also about training and further training of medical and nursing professionals.

According to Kretschmann, the cooperation between the emergency services should also be better coordinated and the billing of services via the health insurance companies should be simplified, "so that we don't always have such huge bureaucratic hurdles".

Saarland's Prime Minister Tobias Hans (CDU) emphasized that the importance of cross-border cooperation would become particularly clear in a pandemic.

That would have been shown by the stresses caused by the border closings in the first wave.

"You have to gradually push back the borders in the health sector so that I can offer the citizens large-regional solutions."

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As in spring, Covid 19 patients were again relocated to Germany from the French border region Grand Est in November.

The neighboring federal states of Baden-Württemberg, Rhineland-Palatinate and Saarland had agreed to accept.