Regarding the draft bill to strengthen nursing competence
14.07.2025 17:47
With this draft bill for a Nursing Competence Act, the Federal Government is pursuing the goal of granting nursing professionals more autonomy and personal responsibility. This long overdue step is necessary to safeguard future health and nursing care.
Furthermore, a large number of regulatory provisions were included, which are dedicated to making benefit and contract law more flexible, further developing nursing care needs planning, and creating a new care sector.
The opening of new fields of activity for nursing professionals under the framework agreement pursuant to Section 73d of the German Social Code (new version) is expressly welcomed. This is an important interim step – repeatedly demanded by company health insurance funds – on the path to a competency-based nursing system that adequately addresses current challenges in healthcare provision. Fundamental prerequisites for effective and practically implementable negotiation results are cross-sectoral negotiations, clarification of competency levels by the legislature, and regulations to ensure cost-effectiveness. These must be established urgently before the agreement comes into force. Together with the Nursing Assistant Act and the announced Nursing and Healthcare Expert Introduction Act, a coherent and transparent competency and education architecture in nursing must result. This includes a clear definition of rights, responsibilities, and delegation pathways, as well as professional collaboration with other professional groups.
The German Association of Company Health Insurance Funds (BKK) strongly rejects the newly established "outpatient" care sector, intended as an intermediate form between the outpatient and inpatient sectors. The resulting complex and bureaucratic regulations will not generate any sustainable boost to innovation in long-term care insurance. They merely introduce a single housing and care model into standard care, and by adhering to the strict sectoral system within long-term care insurance, they prevent any dynamic of innovation. Existing shared living arrangements or new care models currently being tested, or which have proven successful in older pilot projects, will not benefit from the proposed changes. On the contrary, the regulations governing shared living arrangements disrupt the logic of benefit law, leading to increasing opacity and heightened complexity in contract law, including licensing and reimbursement negotiations. In practice, the added value of these arrangements is likely to be marginal and therefore ineffective.