Federal Minister of Health Karl Lauterbach has announced an aid package for the clinics due to the sharp increase in operating costs. "In this energy and inflation crisis, we will not let our hospitals down and will get them through the fall and winter," said the SPD politician on Thursday in the budget debate in the Bundestag. Concrete proposals for this should be presented in the next few weeks and decided upon with the federal states. It's about short-term solutions so that clinics don't get into insurmountable difficulties due to liquidity problems.

The German Hospital Society had recently urgently demanded an immediate adjustment to inflation, since clinics could not pass on significantly increased energy costs.

Staff should be relieved

Lauterbach also highlighted new regulations to relieve nursing staff as further political priorities. In addition, children's hospitals are to be removed from the financing system with flat rates for treatment cases. In this way, they could calculate the costs incurred. It can no longer be accepted that economic aspects have an influence on therapy decisions, said Lauterbach.

He reiterated the goal of more impetus in the digitization of the healthcare system. Germany is still "a developing country in European comparison". The central project is electronic patient files, whereby routine data could also be used for research purposes in the future. Lauterbach announced that he would be visiting Israel next week to find out about leading international concepts for this. Closer cooperation should also be agreed.

In 2023, the healthcare budget is expected to amount to 22 billion euros, which is significantly less than the current figure of 64 billion euros. "This can be explained by the fact that we assume that the pandemic will no longer present us with expensive and unsolvable problems next year," explained Lauterbach.