In Haidhausen, the St. Josefs Association nursing home will be closed. It will cease operations at the end of February next year, after more than 90 years. A lack of staff is the main reason for the closure, explains Christian Dobmeier from the board of the St. Josefs Association. We are currently looking for alternative care places in other homes for 55 seniors who still live in the house on Preysingstrasse.
Last week it became clear to the club that things could no longer continue. A temporary employment agency signaled to them that it could no longer guarantee that it would regularly place workers in the Josefsheim. The use of temporary workers has been the only way to maintain operations in recent months, says Dobmeier. The sickness rate among permanent employees has been very high for a long time and no adequate replacement can be found.
Because of the precarious personnel situation, the association closed a residential wing in the spring and almost halved the number of care places from around a hundred to date. The board had hoped to make ends meet long-term with the existing staff, but in vain. Dobmeier puts the recent sickness rate at 40 percent.
They would need twelve full-time specialists to provide adequate care for the seniors. If several employees are absent for a long time, a larger operator with a lot of staff can compensate for this internally, but not the Josefsverein. And if the temporary workers were also eliminated, there would be a risk of ending up in so-called dangerous care. Then continued operation would no longer be responsible, and the club would also have had to fear that the authorities would close the house overnight. “We have to avoid this situation,” says Dobmeier.
In addition to the lack of staff, there would also be necessary investments in the building if it continued to operate: the rooms would have had to be renovated and modernized, for example by enlarging the bathrooms. These investments would have added to the already growing costs of the past few years, for example due to rising personnel costs – this is not possible for the club. We are in contact with Caritas, which is trying to offer places to the seniors from the Josefsheim, as well as to the employees. Around 30 to 40 people are affected and their jobs will be lost in whole or in part.
The end of the old people’s home does not mean the end of the St. Josef Association, emphasizes Dobmeier. We will continue to be active in Haidhausen in the area of child and youth welfare. The association runs a special education day care center, a children’s home, a crèche and a kindergarten.
As unusual as the closure of a retirement home is at the moment, Christian Dobmeier says he fears that this could happen more often in the future because there is a shortage of skilled workers across the entire industry. According to the city’s health department, there are around 2,000 in all of Munich. That’s why the city recently put together a “package of measures” called “Care in Munich I” to improve the situation in the city. This will cost the city 7.5 million euros between 2024 and 2027. The need for care will increase: there were 27 people in need of care per 1,000 inhabitants in Munich in 2017. According to an evaluation by the Association of Carers in Bavaria, there will be 31 people in need of care by 2027.