After a decline in the pandemic: Visits to the doctor are becoming more frequent again

Status: 12/12/2022 7:13 a.m

Many waiting rooms are full: After a decline during the corona pandemic, people are going to the doctor more often again. General practitioners in particular are well attended – and psychotherapists are also experiencing an enormous increase.

After some significant declines in the corona pandemic, patients went to a doctor’s office in Germany more frequently this year. Numerous doctor visits across all medical specialist groups in the first quarter caused an increase in the number of cases of 4.8 percent compared to the first quarter in the pre-corona year 2019.

This is shown by the new trend report from the Central Institute for Statutory Health Insurance Physicians (Zi). In the second quarter of 2022 there was an increase of 0.3 percent.

In the first quarter of 2022, there was an increase of 3.7 percent in family doctor visits compared to the first three months of the pre-Corona year 2019. In the second quarter there was an increase of 1.9 percent. For psychotherapists, there was even an increase of around 9.5 percent in the first half of the year compared to 2019. Group therapies were particularly in demand – with an increase of up to 48.5 percent for the second quarter of 2022 alone.

Sharp decline in doctor visits in 2020

The figures for specialists also went up this year – with an increase of 5.8 percent in the first and 0.4 percent in the second quarter. In the pediatric practices, the volume remained stable in the first three months compared to this period in the pre-Corona year. In the second quarter there were four percent more cases. The chairman of the institute, Dominik von Stillfried, said that outpatient care would continue to run at full capacity after the pandemic had subsided.

There are over 183,000 registered doctors and psychotherapists. After the start of the pandemic in 2020, personal doctor-patient contacts had declined sharply in some cases. According to the Zi report, during that April there was a minus of 24 percent across all specialist groups. The month before, gatherings of more than two people had been banned in Germany because of the corona virus. Cafes, restaurants and hairdressers had to close. In May 2020 it was still minus 16 percent compared to the same period last year.

Fewer women use mammography screening

The numbers for mammography screening for early detection of breast cancer fell particularly sharply – by minus 98 percent in April 2020. Overall, there were 3.8 percent fewer visits to the doctor in 2020 than in 2019. The following year, people went to the doctor a little more often – albeit with significant fluctuations. The strongest increases in the number of cases were seen in November and December 2021. There was an increase of around 12 and 17 percent respectively compared to these months in the pre-Corona year 2019.

For the whole of 2021, the number of practice visits was up 0.9 percent, slightly above the figure for 2019. Differences are becoming clear between the individual areas – even in the first few months of the current year. For example, there was an increase of 40 percent in laboratory doctors in the first quarter of 2022 compared to 2019. The Zi study authors attribute this to corona studies. In the case of mammography screening, the number of cases continued to decline compared to 2019 – with a minus of 2.7 percent in the second quarter.

There was a particularly significant increase in telephone consultations: from January to June 2022, 4.3 million medical consultations were billed by telephone – 1.9 million more than in the same time window in 2019. There were also around 1.6 million in the first half of 2022 Video consultation hours, which still played a minor role in the pre-corona year 2019.

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