Because the emergency room is overburdened, the children’s clinic in Memmingen in Swabia advises parents to take more rest if their children become ill. “If your child shows signs of infection such as fever, cough, runny nose or diarrhea, this is in most cases not an emergency,” said the chief doctor of the children’s clinic, David Frommhold, on Thursday. In many cases the children could be treated at home. Otherwise, practice doctors would be available on working days, and the pediatrician on call on weekends and public holidays.
At the moment, however, many parents and their children come straight to the emergency room because of respiratory infections caused by pathogens such as the respiratory syncytial virus (RS virus), said Frommhold. The “flood of patients” is hardly manageable: “The wards are full or overcrowded and there are so many patients in the emergency room that the waiting times are extended immensely.” To make use of the children’s clinic in such a way without an emergency would unnecessarily endanger human life. Because many children in Bavaria are currently infected with the RS virus, many children’s hospitals in the Free State hardly have any free beds. At the beginning of November, the state chairman of the professional association of paediatricians, Dominik Ewald, said that the care of the children was not endangered.