The Munich Clinic Schwabing is to get a parental home. By 2025, a building in the vicinity of the children’s hospital is to be redesigned in such a way that there will be 20 rooms on three floors in which parents of seriously ill children can find accommodation and care. Next Wednesday, the city council is to clear the way for the project by approving the transfer of a heritable building right to building number 21 of the city clinic to the “Foundation Children’s Clinic”. The conversion could then begin next year and should be completed by 2025. The costs are currently estimated at 16 million euros. The advent calendar for good works of the Süddeutsche Zeitung eV and the “We help Munich” foundation want to pay for this.
“I am very satisfied that this was successful and that we are doing something really good for the children and their families,” says Dieter Reiter, who in his capacity as mayor heads the hospital’s supervisory board and initiated the cooperation. According to the SPD politician, he could not imagine anything but a positive vote by the city council.
“This step cannot be overestimated,” says Michael Diederich, the chairman of the board of the “Foundation Children’s Hospital”. According to his deputy Armin Grübl, who works as senior physician in the children’s clinic, the house is to become more “than just a hotel business”. In the new institution, parents should be offered support in every form. “We want to create a meeting place in which social care is guaranteed, psychological care and also care for the siblings of the seriously ill children who are treated by us,” says Irene Teichert-von Lüttichau, head of the oncology focus .
There is even less space for parents in the new children’s clinic
At present, it cannot always be guaranteed that parents can stay nearby around the clock if their children have to stay at the Schwabing Clinic for treatment for a longer period of time. Opportunities sometimes arise in the rooms currently in use, but this is not certain; sometimes provisional overnight accommodations are created in camp beds. A stressful situation – for the parents as well as for the medical staff.
With the completion of the new building for the children’s clinic in the coming year, the options will also be limited. The new children’s center is strongly geared to the needs of young patients; there will only be two-bed rooms in it – which means that the space for accompanying persons will be even tighter. “That’s why we really need the parental home,” says senior physician Armin Grübl.
This is to be built in building 21 of the complex, which is located near the central entrance on Parzivalstraße and is directly adjacent to the clinic church. The new parents’ house would be close to the children’s hospital, but would not be directly connected to it. Doctors consider this position to be optimal. The listed building is to be extensively modernized and redesigned, but the exterior will remain unchanged. The school for the sick, which has been housed in it up to now, is to move within the hospital grounds.
The city itself is not allowed to finance the project
“Our readers are helping tremendously! This will be the largest single investment in the Advent calendar in its almost 75-year history. We have long thought about supporting such a lighthouse project,” says SZ Managing Director and Adventskalender Chairman Karl Ulrich.
Although the estimated construction costs for the project have risen by 35 percent in the past two years due to the price increase, Stephan Heller, chairman of the board of the “We help Munich” foundation, assures: “We can do it.” The foundation also wants to “remain permanently connected” to the house.
However, like the SZ Advent calendar, it cannot participate in ongoing operations for reasons of foundation law. The “Children’s Clinic Foundation” guarantees that this will be maintained for the first five years after completion.
Mayor Dieter Reiter is also concerned about the long-term perspective. For him, the current situation in child and adolescent medicine is unsatisfactory. “I’m annoyed that such a parental home is not a normal, billable investment. The Hospital Financing Act does not provide for that. We spend billions on new hospitals, but we are not allowed to finance something so important and are therefore dependent on foundations,” said Reiter, who therefore wants to press for changes, both with his SPD party colleague, Federal Minister of Health Karl Lauterbach, and with the Bavarian Minister of Health Klaus Holetschek (CSU). “We are now solving it for our children’s hospital in Schwabing, but we are by no means the only ones experiencing this dilemma,” says Reiter.