Innsbruck (OTS) – While health policy came into focus during the pandemic and one federal and state policy appearance followed the next, there is now radio silence. Patients in the hallway and postponed operations are apparently not a crisis now.

Tyrol is lagging behind. While around ten primary care units have been built in Vienna, Lower and Upper Austria and Styria, in Tyrol we are still waiting. The medical centers with the awkward names are supposed to deliver what patients are increasingly distant from. Security of supply, longer opening hours of the ordinations, accessing a service with the e-card and not having to go to the doctor of your choice and pay a lot yourself. Statutory health insurance physicians are sometimes overcrowded, are no longer accepting patients, and positions remain unfilled.
From the patient’s perspective, it is irrelevant who delayed the start of the primary care units in Tyrol. The Medical Association, the Austrian Health Insurance Fund or a lack of pressure from state politics. The state and health insurance companies are now stepping up financially and are sweetening the doctors’ start in the medical center with comprehensive financial support. The state and the health insurance fund pay the medical team a manager to run the store and additional staff from social workers to speech therapists in order to even get a primary care unit started. Other federal states have managed it without additional funding agreements. The taxpayer pays the additional costs in Tyrol.
The taxpayer has already paid one bill, namely that for social security. This results in a legal supply mandate. Statutory health insurance doctors are less and less able to guarantee this in private practice and the hospitals apparently cannot either. For months, nurses and doctors have been pointing out that patients have to wait long for operations due to a lack of staff and that patients are turned away even if they are in pain. Patients even have to lie in the hallway because hospital managers have to spend hours looking for a free bed and care. The hospital management now also says that planned operations have become a flexible term.
So where is the crisis team? Because a crisis in the health system is obvious. Hospital and doctor density is high in Austria. But no one dares to look through hospitals and see what is needed where. After the pandemic, there was no desire to tackle real hospital reform at either the federal or state level, even though the pandemic in particular has shown how necessary such a reform would be.
More and more patients are being left behind. This is outrageous and a scandal.

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