Now it doesn’t come after all, the facility-related vaccination requirement. Was all the effort in vain? “We have been busy since December querying the vaccination status of the employees,” says Claas Hohmann, director of the Wolfartklinik in Graefelfing. “With 400 people in the house, that’s a full-time job.” Nationwide, doctors, nurses, physiotherapists and even hospital janitors must provide their employers with proof of a full vaccination series by March 16th. But on Monday, the Bavarian Prime Minister Markus Söder pulled the plug: The enforcement of compulsory vaccination should be suspended in the Free State. To combat the omicron wave, according to Söder, the institution-related vaccination requirement is “no longer an effective means”.
“Our future and progressive government passed a law without knowing how it should be implemented,” says Claas Hohmann. “If compulsory vaccination is no longer of any use, but will certainly bring skilled workers out of the company in the near future, you can ask yourself how useful it is.” After all, quite a few, including the Verdi trade union and the German Nursing Council, fear that the situation will worsen, since the loss of unvaccinated nursing staff could result in staff shortages. Hohmann, who is not only an orthopaedist but also an expert in hospital hygiene, sees the problem elsewhere. “We keep lists of who is vaccinated and who is not, and report them to the health department,” said the 58-year-old. “But how is the health department supposed to handle all of this at once?”
Apparently Söder also asked himself this question. For the health authorities, the suspension of the facility-related vaccination requirement should mean a relief – but the effort for the facilities themselves will remain for the time being. “As I understand it, the state of Bavaria can only suspend execution,” says Hohmann. “We’ll probably have to make the reports anyway. Of course you’ll scratch your head.”
The Munich district office is also preparing for the measure decided by the federal government, despite the temporary suspension in Bavaria. “We have to upgrade our staff in case the partial vaccination requirement comes up,” says District Administrator Christoph Göbel (CSU). For example, unvaccinated people would have to submit certificates if they could not be vaccinated for health reasons. For these cases, according to District Administrator Göbel, the health department must be “replenished”; medically trained staff are needed to check the evidence. The consequences of people who simply refuse to be vaccinated have not yet been clarified. “We don’t yet know what a possible escalating catalog of sanctions will look like, for example with fines or bans on entry, explains Göbel. But it is clear that additional legally trained staff will be needed in the health department. Göbel expects that many cases in It will therefore not be sufficient to rely on the help of the Bundeswehr, for example, when collecting the number of corona cases.
“The constant back and forth with the regulations is difficult and demotivating.”
Doris Schneider, managing director of the Caritas old people’s homes in Munich and the rest of Upper Bavaria, criticizes the state government’s change of course: “The constant back and forth with the regulations is difficult and demotivating.” She cannot say whether the vaccination status of the employees still needs to be checked. According to Schneider, apart from the Prime Minister’s opinion, nothing is known about how to proceed. “It is to be feared that there will again be no quick answers and that the uncertainty will continue to increase.”
On the part of Caritas, nothing would have stood in the way of the implementation of the facility-related compulsory vaccination. “The preparations for the reports have been made, which means that on March 16th it could be reported specifically which employees are not vaccinated,” says Schneider. She cannot assess the extent to which the health department would have been able to enforce the vaccination requirement. “It has not yet been foreseeable how quickly the health authorities can react to the reports.”
This in turn has led to great uncertainty in the homes, especially with regard to the establishment of rosters, although 95 percent of Caritas employees are vaccinated according to Schneider. The question of the use of external service providers in the facilities, such as craftsmen, also remains open. It has not yet been clarified whether they would be affected by the facility-related compulsory vaccination or not. Across the district, according to the statement from the district office, around 90 percent of all employees in care facilities were at least basic immunized or boosted at the end of January.
Instead of a partial one, Schneider would like a general obligation to vaccinate. Fighting the corona virus is “a task for society as a whole and not the problem of individual institutions,” she says. The partial obligation to vaccinate could also increase the shortage of staff in the healthcare system. “We’ve been living with the shortage of skilled workers for years without politicians having made any serious contribution to improving the situation. That’s why it’s politics here too.”
So many questions remain unanswered. “It’s all a bit immature,” sums up Claas Hohmann. “Of course, you could also think before you introduce a law. But think beforehand – that’s not the future in Germany.”