The President of the Association of Nursing People in Bavaria (VdPB) sounds a little sheepish at the beginning: From the beginning we knew that the professional group that we represent here does not react “very happily” to new structures and is not easy to move to enter self-government: “We knew it would be a long road.”
The Nursing Association in Bavaria, the nursing advocacy group mandated by politicians in 2017, now has a little more than 4,000 members. Given that there are around 165,000 nursing staff in Bavaria, it can hardly claim to speak for nursing as a whole. But that is exactly what the state government wants; it wants to establish “strong self-administration of the nursing profession in Bavaria”. This is what it says in the bill that will be discussed in the Health Committee on Tuesday. This is also how the opposition and all the experts invited to the hearing on Tuesday see it. There is agreement on the goal: strong self-administration should make care more attractive and thus also alleviate the foreseeable emergency in care. The path, however, is very controversial.
The state government wants to strengthen the nursing association in various ways. On the one hand, this should in future be responsible for drawing up professional and further training regulations, which many speakers support. What is more critical, however, is the plan that in the future all nursing staff will be required to register with the VdPB.
The planned mandatory professional register is intended to solve two problems: On the one hand, we would then know for the first time how many nursing staff with which qualifications actually work in Bavaria. During the corona pandemic, we didn’t even know how many intensive care specialists there were in Bavaria, explains nursing researcher Thomas Klie, who advises the nurses’ association on legal issues. Secondly, mandatory registration can also be a way to get in touch with carers and encourage them to join. That’s the hope. But this is very controversial among the invited experts.
For the Bavarian State Nursing Council (BLPR), for example, the registration requirement is not enough. For many years he has been campaigning for a nursing chamber with compulsory membership for all nursing staff, similar to the one that exists for doctors or craftsmen. Registration can only be a first step towards this. The draft law lacks a political commitment to genuine, autonomous, professional self-government.
The State Nursing Council received support at the hearing from the ethics professor at the Catholic University of Munich, Constanze Giese: “It cannot be the case that I am obliged to register again every time I change job. But in order to have a say in the professional representation, you have to be in the association be.” She believes that nurses should automatically become members of the nurses’ association when they register.
The nursing expert is against coercion
An obligation to register could meet with great resistance, warns Peter Baumeister, professor of social work law at the Baden-Württemberg Cooperative State University. He even sees the danger that the whole idea of the association could fail because of this, especially if it were to enforce or even threaten to revoke the professional license. “Do you really want to go and force registration?” he asks. “I think it’s strong tobacco.”
Nursing expert Klie also expressly speaks out against coercion. He supports the registration requirement itself. She expresses how important it is that nursing faces its social responsibility. “Without recognized and independent care, we will not be able to meet the challenges of demographic changes,” says Klie. In the future, more old people will have to be cared for with fewer nursing staff.
The tipping point for Bavaria will be reached in 2027. Then more sisters and nurses would retire than young people would enter the profession. It is therefore extremely important to gain an overview of the existing forces and to organize them into an independent representation of interests. However, in his view, this should not be enforced through coercion, but rather through incentives. Nursing staff in management positions in particular could benefit from a connection to the nursing association and the right to have a say.