Archive:
At its meeting in November 2021, the board of the German Medical Association discussed and decided on a statement on “care in sparsely populated regions” on the recommendation of the board of the “Standing Working Group on Health Services Research”. After extensive discussion under the joint aegis of Prof. Dr. med. Wolfgang Hoffmann and Prof. Dr. med. Wilhelm-Bernhard Niebling, both leaders of the standing working group “Health Services Research”, has published part 1 of the statement on problem presentation and monitoring in the “Deutsches Ärzteblatt” (1). Here you can read the background as well as the most important results and facts.
23.03.2022
Comment from Dr. rer. pole. Ilona Köster-Steinebach, Sepsis Foundation
23.03.2022
In addition to the “theory of practice”, the habitus theory goes back to Pierre Bourdieu (1974), who examined how the subject and structural levels arise mutually and are reproduced in social interactions. The habitus is a central concept that connects all theoretical components in Bourdieu's “theory of practice”, the central concern of which is overcoming the opposition between subjectivism and objectivism. According to Bourdieu (1987), habitus stands for a person's “patterns of perception, thought and action” in which all incorporated, previous social experiences are expressed. The habitus is primarily shaped by the specific social position that members of a social group occupy within a social structure. More generally, the concept serves to convey individual dispositions (subject level) and social possibilities (structural level). According to Bourdieu, the actor (e.g. health workers) is understood as the bearer of a habitus (Reckwitz 2008).
23.03.2022
The platform - Charité Health Care Research, founded in 2019 on the initiative of the BMBF-funded research networks EMANet and NAVICARE, has now organized its 3rd Charité Health Care Research Congress - again in online format. Well over 100 participants followed the presentation of various Charité innovation fund projects from the funding area of “health care research” in the satellite symposium, as well as in the plenary session after the welcome by Prof. Dr. Christoph Heintze (speaker of the platform – Charité Health Services Research) and Prof. Dr. Elke Schäffner (Deputy Speaker of the Platform) was followed by greetings from Ulrike Gote (Senator for Science, Health, Care and Equality, Berlin) and Prof. Dr. Heyo Kroemer (Chairman of the Charité – University Medicine Berlin) and Prof. Dr. Martin Kreis (Board of Health Care Charité – University Medicine Berlin).
23.03.2022
In NRW's new hospital plan, planning is no longer based on the number of beds, but rather with 32 service areas, 64 service groups and four planning levels. Its practical implementation will be a major challenge for every hospital - with 400 hospital locations in North Rhine-Westphalia alone. It is planned that each head of administration must first analyze the service areas of his company and then those of all competitors in order to negotiate the new distribution of care on this basis - first with the competitors, then with the regional associations of health insurance companies. Data analysis could support hospital planning in North Rhine-Westphalia. How this works is explained in an interview with “Monitor Healthcare Research” Dr. Eberhard Hansis and Dr. Hannes Dahnke, two physicists who founded the Hamburg data analytics company Vebeto, which specializes in analyzing German hospitals using publicly available data.
23.03.2022
“Beyond camp thinking” was the title of the Alliance of Municipal Hospitals (AKG) in its “reform approaches for a sustainable and quality-oriented hospital landscape” presented in September last year together with the AOK Federal Association. “Rethinking health” called for the “Target Image 2030”, which many stakeholders from Saxony presented to State Minister Petra Köpping (Saxon State Ministry for Social Affairs and Social Cohesion) at the beginning of February this year. There have also been and are currently more reform proposals than ever before - such as from Barmer ("For the further development of inpatient care structures and hospital financing"), position papers such as those from the GKV National Association on ("Hospital care after the Corona pandemic 2020") , reports on the “future of medical care in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania” (Health Care Business GmbH) and on the “hospital landscape of North Rhine-Westphalia” (Lohfert & Lohfert), theses papers such as that from the BKK umbrella association, vdek and VUD for “a targeted further development of hospital care”, Catalogs of demands such as “Change strategy now!” by the two authors Prof. Dr. Edmund AM Neugebauer and Dr. Dr. Klaus Piwernetz or individual statements such as “Securing good health care and care in the long term” from G-BA boss Prof. Josef Hecken. They all have one thing in common: They recognize that there is no alternative to the “need to address change” (Hecken) and that now is the time to “rethink our health system” (Neugebauer/Piwernetz).
23.03.2022
In its coalition agreement, the current federal government announced, among other things, the strengthening of the Public Health Service (ÖGD) and the establishment of a “Federal Institute for Public Health”, but has not (yet) elaborated on this. For this reason, the Federal Association of Managed Care eV (BMC) has taken on this task and, together with many fellow thinkers, published a paper entitled “Impulses for a Federal Institute for Public Health” and discussed how in a public webinar with over 100 participants such an institute could be set up.
23.03.2022
Screening for atrial fibrillation (AF) is recommended in the guidelines of the European Society of Cardiology (ESC) (Hindricks et al. 2020), but is currently not implemented in the form of systematic health programs in Germany. Given demographic changes and the age-dependent occurrence of AF, it is predicted that by 2060 the number of patients aged over 65 years with AF in Europe will increase to over 14 million (Krijthe et al. 2013). Since AF is a relevant risk factor for stroke, screening for AF will become increasingly important. In order to be able to assess the possible effects of introducing guideline-based screening for AF in the German health care context - in particular to avoid long-term health and health economic consequences - a systematic literature search was carried out in 2019. No evidence could be identified from completed, prospective studies in the German health care context that report long-term clinically relevant events after screening for AF. Against this background, a Markov model was developed with which the effects of a screening for AF can be simulated. This model is intended to contribute to the professional public discussion on the detection of AF and the prevention of thromboembolic events and to enable the derivation of adequate measures for better care. For this work, on the one hand, the long-term effects of consistent implementation of the screening measures provided for in the ESC guidelines with regard to the prevention of AF-associated strokes and systemic embolism were examined. On the other hand, the direct health economic implications were considered from the perspective of statutory health insurance (SHI).
29.01.2022
In the cover interview at the start of the year with “Monitor Health Services Research”, Prof. Dr. med. Dr. hc mult. Wolfgang Holzgreve, MBA, explains the role and importance of university hospitals in providing care, especially in the case of Corona. The UKB has treated a total of 1,000 Covid-19 patients so far, currently there are 40. However, the medical director and chairman of the board of the University Hospital Bonn (UKB) gives the all-clear: “Even if the current situation requires strenuous bed and operating theater management on a daily basis, This is everyday life for us and, as a maximum care provider, a constant task.” Despite everything, the UKB was the only one of Germany's 35 university hospitals to record an increase in performance and thus an increase in sales even in the Corona year 2020.
29.01.2022
Karl-Josef Laumann is a veteran of German politics and also of health policy, in which he has been involved in one function or another since the 1990s, when he was still under Federal Health Minister Norbert Blüm. From 2005 to 2010 he was Minister for Labor, Health and Social Affairs for the state of North Rhine-Westphalia for the first time, and he has been so for the second time since 2017. Now, in this legislative period, he has undertaken almost a once-in-a-century project: hospital planning that also deserves the word planning because it translates the previously usual bed bargaining into very differentiated structural planning at the service level. This plan could well be a blueprint for all other federal states, which would change hospital planning throughout Germany; also because – according to Laumann – “it will become clear in five years at the latest that this hospital planning has led to an increase in the quality of care”.