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The authorities, which are subordinate to the Federal Ministry of Health, lack a total of more than 100 IT staff - although these are extremely important for coping with the corona pandemic.

The Robert Koch Institute (RKI), the Paul Ehrlich Institute (PEI) and the Federal Center for Health Education (BZgA) are affected.

This emerges from a response by the federal government to a small request from the Left Group that WELT AM SONNTAG has received.

As early as December, this newspaper had exclusively reported that the Robert Koch Institute - the most important authority in the Corona crisis - was suffering from a massive shortage of IT specialists.

A need for 101 additional positions related to information technology was identified there in 2018.

However, the federal government and the Bundestag responsible for the budget did not address this problem.

Only six IT jobs have been created since the defect was discovered.

For the year 2021 alone, the RKI applied for 68 digitization points, but the authority was only granted four positions.

The RKI is currently deploying IT staff from third-party funds on a temporary basis to alleviate the shortage.

The government's response to the small inquiry now shows that the problem goes well beyond the Robert Koch Institute.

Accordingly, extensive organizational investigations were carried out by external consultants in most of the authorities of the Ministry of Health between 2017 and 2019.

In each case, a significant shortage of staff was identified - i.e. even before the pandemic.

Since then, Corona has added additional tasks for the authorities.

The companies determined the personnel requirements according to guidelines of the Federal Ministry of the Interior (BMI), which apply equally to all authorities.

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According to the study, there is a lack of specialists in the IT sector in particular.

The Paul Ehrlich Institute was missing ten and the Federal Center for Health Education 5.5 positions related to the digital.

None of these have yet been created.

In the same year, the German Institute for Medical Documentation and Information (DIMDI) lacked 39 employees in information technology, but the authority has since been dissolved and incorporated into the Federal Office for Drugs and Medical Devices (BfArM).

No figures are available for the BfArM itself, as the last authority-wide organizational investigation was a long time ago.

In the Paul Ehrlich Institute, which is responsible for vaccines, a general shortage of staff across all areas of the institute was found.

The organizational study - for which a total of 2.5 million euros was paid to external consultants - confirmed that the PEI needed 104 full-time positions for normal operations.

Of these positions, only 19 have been created since the investigation.

The PEI was unable to answer a request on this topic before publication.

The PEI employees are "currently primarily involved in tasks to cope with the pandemic".

Jan Korte, Parliamentary Managing Director of the Left in the Bundestag, said: "If a functioning RKI had been important to the federal government and the coalition of CDU / CSU and SPD before the pandemic, then the missing positions would have been set up long ago." The federal government has protection against infection Taken lightly, there must now be a lesson from the pandemic: "The structural underfunding of authorities and the health and social system must be ended." State structures that are sewn to the edge in this way could not be crisis-proof, said Korte .

In the answer to the small question, the Federal Government refers to a general increase in jobs at the RKI in other areas as well as to a new center for artificial intelligence that is to belong to the RKI.

On request, however, the RKI declares that no tenders have been made for the staff and the opening of the center has not yet been scheduled.

In the future, the IT staff there would primarily be used to set up and operate the AI ​​infrastructure and the center.

The Federal Ministry of Health left a request from WELT AM SONNTAG unanswered by the editorial deadline.

In a written answer to a question by the Greens health expert Kordula Schulz-Asche, which is available to this newspaper, the federal government also refers to a report that is currently in progress.

At the end of March, the latter should present “proposals for the legal, infrastructural and personnel strengthening of the Robert Koch Institute” for the period during the pandemic.