Overloaded clinics
The first federal states are moving intensive care patients according to the clover leaf concept – that’s behind it
Everyday life in an intensive care unit: In the Leipzig University Clinic, nurses are preparing to turn a corona patient into the prone position
© dpa
The hospitals in Germany are full. Several federal states have now officially activated the so-called cloverleaf concept for the transfer of intensive care patients. How does that go?
Bavaria and four other federal states officially have the so-called Shamrock concept activated for the strategic transfer of intensive care patients. As the German Interdisciplinary Association for Intensive and Emergency Medicine (Divi) announced on Wednesday night, a “larger number” of patients from Bavaria, Thuringia, Saxony, Berlin and Brandenburg will be relocated to other “clover-leaf regions” in the next few days will.
The steering group that coordinates the relocations will meet on Wednesday, said a Divi spokeswoman for the AFP news agency in the evening. It should also be clarified with which means of transport the affected patients would be transferred.
Shamrock concept: from the inside out
Under the impression of the first corona wave, the federal and state governments developed a concept for the nationwide transfer of patients in spring 2020. In September last year, the so-called cloverleaf concept was then adopted by the Interior and Health Ministers. The 16 federal states are divided into five groups – the North, East, South, Southwest and West clovers:
- South: Bavaria
- Southwest: Baden-Württemberg, Saarland, Rhineland-Palatinate and Hesse
- West: North Rhine-Westphalia
- East: Thuringia, Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt, Brandenburg and Berlin
- North: Lower Saxony, Bremen, Hamburg, Schleswig-Holstein and Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania
The concept envisages that the installation will initially take place within the five regions – west, north, east, south, south-west. If there are no longer any vacancies in one of these regions, the transfer to other areas will be organized in exchange with the joint reporting and situation center of the federal and state governments at the Federal Office for Civil Protection and Disaster Aid (BBK). A specialist group from the Robert Koch Institute is providing advice.
Schröder: Expect to move beyond the clover leaf
“We have to assume that there will be relocations beyond a clover leaf”, warned the chairman of the working group of the conference of interior ministers for fire-fighting, rescue, disaster control and civil defense, Hermann Schröder. At the moment there was still free capacity in the north and in Hesse.
In the east and south of Germany, the seven-day incidence of corona infections is currently particularly high. It was highest on Tuesday in Saxony with 969.9, followed by Thuringia with 685.3 and Bavaria with 644.9. Some counties in these federal states have incidences over a thousand. The seven-day incidence indicates the number of new infections per 100,000 inhabitants within a week.