At first glance, the numbers that Gerald Quitterer wants to present as President of the Bavarian Medical Association at the 80th Bavarian Medical Congress in Hof seem encouraging. The chamber now has slightly more than 90,000 registered doctors. However: Almost 23,000 of them are no longer working as a doctor – for example because they are already retired. At the end of September, according to Quitterer, a total of 67,480 registered medical professionals were still working – an increase of 1.9 percent.
On Tuesday he spoke in the Munich press club of a “record level” and warned at the same time: “What reads like a success story, nevertheless hides some worrying developments.” Worrying because the increase in the number of doctors is not enough to meet demand, as the Chamber President fears. It is the order of the day to give significantly more young people access to medical studies – in other words, many more places will have to be created at state universities in the future.
There are three main reasons for the lack of qualified medical staff – or, as Quitterer put it, “that the available medical hours do not increase in line with the demand”. Point one: a larger number of doctors from the baby boomer generation will be retiring in the near future. Point two: At the same time, the need for doctors is growing, which is particularly noticeable in Corona times.
But even without a pandemic, the following applies: The number of elderly people who are dependent on medical care is increasing. Many of them suffer from several diseases at the same time. Point three: the trend towards part-time work, which does not stop at the medical professions. Young medical professionals – many of them women – strive to combine work and family. “The young doctors are therefore no longer 100 percent available to us,” said Quitterer.
Clinics should adhere to collective agreements
One topic that is likely to make waves is the demand that Andreas Botzlar, the Chamber’s First Vice-President, directed to Bavaria’s hospitals. “I appeal to the clinics to adhere to legally concluded collective agreements,” he said on Tuesday. It is true that clauses on working time recording, duty scheduling and duty hours are contained in collective agreements. “But if employers do not adhere to these contracts in practice, little is gained,” said Botzlar. Even before the Corona crisis, the daily work of clinicians was characterized by overtime and a high number of night and weekend shifts.
However, the pandemic has pushed the doctors even more to their limits. Botzlar also expressed massive criticism of the reorganization of the Bavarian Cancer Register some years ago, since which all malignant neoplasms and their early forms have been comprehensively recorded under the direction of the State Office for Health and Food Safety. Regional cancer registries, on the other hand, have been closed and their data deleted, according to Botzlar.
The topic that will cause particularly heated discussions at the Doctors’ Day in Hof (October 15 to 17) is the question of whether the additional designation homeopathy will continue to have its place in the medical training regulations in the future – or, to put it mildly, flies out. “Homeopathy is as popular as it is controversial,” said Chamber President Gerald Quitterer in a Solomonic manner. His deputy Botzlar indicated that lawsuits would be feared if the result of the vote did not take place in the desired form. When asked for her own opinion, Botzlar said – also with regard to Quitterer: “We will do the devil to pretend a tendency here.”