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By offering financial incentives for ex-intensive care workers to come back, hospitals could tap a third of additional spaces, health experts say.
Faced with the insufficient number of places in intensive care, hospital directors argue that they lack qualified staff. For experts and insiders of the hospital world, this would only be a false excuse.
Health economist, Heinz Locher thus declares in the “SonntagsZeitung” that “the fact that after two years of pandemic, there are fewer places in intensive care instead of having more, is not inevitable, but a pure failure of politics ”.
Notice to retirees and “frustrated”
According to him, hospitals could use a third more intensive care places. How? ‘Or’ What? By mobilizing intensive care specialists retired or “frustrated” at having left the profession in recent years.
He recommends giving each person who leaves the profession a sufficiently high premium and employment conditions as adapted as possible to their wishes. “Many of them would return, at least for a limited period,” he assures us. Faced with the billions spent on the pandemic, a “special bonus of 20,000 francs for each nurse in intensive care would be justified”.
Heinz Locher therefore asks the politicians, and the cantons, responsible for the management of hospitals, to take a package of urgent measures to make up for negligence.
A “conspiracy”
The former administrative director of the University Hospital Zurich, Werner Widmer, made similar remarks recently in the “NZZ”: “If the Federal Council paid hospitals double the amount for each Covid patient in intensive care (IPS), hospitals could also double the salaries of nursing staff ”.
According to Heinz Locher, the wrong incentives in hospitals even lead to unnecessary treatment being carried out at the expense of intensive care units. For example, reports from the Federal Office of Public Health and the Federal Audit Office show that up to 20% of unnecessary heart and knee operations are carried out on supplementary insureds. “But nobody wants to change that”, because according to him, everyone benefits, from doctors to hospitals, through health funds and even the cantons. “It’s a conspiracy.”
Albert Rösti, national councilor UDC (BE), has been campaigning for months within the Committee on Health and the Parliament for more places in intensive care. And it has just achieved a small success, reports the “SonntagsZeitung”: Parliament obliged the Federal Council to give the cantons directives concerning the number of intensive care places. He hopes that the Confederation will oblige the cantons to “finally invest in their intensive care units and recruit staff by all means”.
(ewe)