How many nurses in Bavaria have received further training to work in intensive care units? And where do you work? During the Corona pandemic, we would have liked to have known this in order to plan capacities and predict bottlenecks. And such information would be important even now, as the country prepares to care for an aging society. How many employees have specialized in dealing with old people and people with dementia as so-called geriatric specialists? The answer is: nobody knows for sure. The data has not yet been collected.
That should now change: According to the will of the state government, all nursing staff in Bavaria should in future be registered with their name, address, date of birth and their specific job title. They should also indicate academic titles and nursing training and further education titles in the planned professional register. The opposition, however, has doubts as to whether this can be implemented so easily.
The registration requirement is part of a planned law that is intended to strengthen nursing as a separate profession. Politicians have recently given nursing more tasks and its own areas of responsibility. This requires strong professional representation. Politics and science agree on this. That is why, under the planned law, the Association of Nurses in Bavaria (VdPB), founded in 2017 as a voluntary interest group, will also be tasked with creating professional and further training regulations. And it is she who is supposed to take care of the registration. The aim is “to establish strong self-government in the nursing profession,” says the draft law.
However, there could be a catch: the majority of nursing staff may not be particularly interested in organizing themselves professionally. In any case, this was the experience in Lower Saxony and Schleswig-Holstein. The federal states founded nursing chambers in 2017 and 2018, but had to close them again in 2021 because a clear majority of nurses voted against the chambers with their mandatory membership and mandatory contributions. In Bavaria they took a slightly different approach. Instead of a chamber, a voluntary and free interest group was created: the Nursing Association. However, the voluntary nature has a disadvantage: in April last year, the VdPB only had 3,500 members and can therefore hardly speak for the entire professional group of nurses in Bavaria.
The VdPB therefore welcomes the reform plans. The planned registration requirement is the only way in which the nursing professional group can present itself in the entire range of its competencies and position itself in the healthcare system, said a spokeswoman.
The unions fear that the reform will cause them to lose influence
That’s exactly what the unions see differently. The reform would set the stage for the gradual introduction of a nursing chamber, warns the German Federation of Trade Unions in Bavaria. The unions also fear that the reform will cause them to lose influence. While the Nursing Association has so far also represented associations and unions, in the future it will only speak for the nursing staff organized there. The union criticizes that Verdi alone represents more nursing staff than all professional nursing associations nationwide.
The opposition in the state parliament also expresses concerns about a registration requirement. “Who is supposed to enforce this? And what happens if the nursing staff refuse?” asks the deputy chairwoman of the Committee for Health and Care, Ruth Waldmann (SPD). The opposition still has many questions, including about data protection. She has therefore pushed through an expert hearing in the Health Committee for Wednesday next week. Waldmann also criticizes how the law came about. A lot of information was withheld from the opposition, including an evaluation of the nursing association by the consulting firm Kienbaum.
Cautiously skeptical tones also come from science: Registering nursing staff would be desirable, says nursing expert Thomas Klie. However, many nursing staff reacted sensitively to such state interference, says Klie, who works as legal counsel for the VdPB. He therefore recommends initially registering only some of the nursing staff. In 2020, the VdPB was already able to record the so-called practice instructors, i.e. those nursing staff who train others. This registration was successful without protest.