Thomas Dietz, December 2, 2022, Hospitals, Labor and Immigration

German Bundestag, Plenarprotokoll 20/74, 8809-8810.

Right honorable Frau President. Ladies and gentlemen.

Hospital care in Germany presently stands before the horrifying result of the years’ long ignorance of the ruling policy in regards this fundamental area of a sozial society. Now already, necessary care measures often cannot be implemented with the needed expenditure because there is a shortage of time, personnel or the corresponding training. It comes to an implicit rationing; care of patients, surveillance of patients, conversation with relatives and a correct documentation are scarcely still to be appropriately realized.  

The actual care work is increasingly hollowed out because our highly qualified and well trained care staff need to undertake duties which could be ensured by other personnel. The nurses need to concern themselves with the sick, and ought not to serve as a collection and delivery service, as cleaning staff or as full-time documentation staff.

The discontent resulting therefrom ever again ends in the flight of qualified staff to other professions. The more than unjust Corona care bonus law, in regards to which many co-workers came out empty-handed, has led to further displeasure – thus to a devilish circle which cannot be broken if you are not able to answer the question of how you want to obtain more personnel.

In the discussion of the draft law in committee, in regards my proposal, it came to one of the usual cries of the left-green bloc: “And more immigration!”  That means: So as to solve the problems in the hospital care, we need, according to the red and green view, additional immigration.

            Kordula Schulz-Asche (Greens): Of course we need it!

            Nicole Westig (FDP): For all!

            Götz Frömming (AfD): Exactly, the others who cling to the staff!

Yet that exactly is your psychological problem, valued colleagues. You believe to be able to solve with immigration all the problems which in the last decades in Germany have piled up to a Kilamanjaro. Germany is long since no more an attractive immigration land for foreign skilled labor.

Kordula Schulz-Asche (Greens): We have demographic problem! We have a demographic problem because women were prevented from combining career and children!

I am speaking here.

The taxes and duties in this country are much too high and the working conditions too poor.

            Götz Frömming (AfD): That is the truth! Place 13, behind Roumania!

Yet Germany is meantime the most attractive immigration land for sozial refugees.           

Kordula Schulz-Asche (Greens): Yet who have no care training. On that account, this plays no role here!

Our European neighbors and friends meantime fill special trains so as to bring these people for free. We need now state: That out of this potential of two to three million immigrants of the last years,

            Christos Pantazis (SPD):  We are speaking on a hospital care relief law!

we could not once obtain sufficient skilled labor to sort the baggage at the airports, to say nothing of trained care staff with the absolutely indispensable knowledge of the language.

I want here to explicitly mention the nationwide study “I may nurse again, if…” of the Bremen employees chamber of April 2022 with more than 12,000 questioned.

            Heike Engelhardt (SPD): The theme!

In this was said: There might be at least 300,000 full-time nursing staff in Germany as a result of a return to the profession, or by making available an additional increase of working hours in so far as the working conditions were improved. You have managed, at a time in which there was a personnel shortage, to force thousands out of the profession by means of the institutionalized vaccination mandate, and to intimidate others from becoming active in this area. There continues to be a slackness in hiring because the illegally institutionalized vaccination mandate still runs to the end of the year and was not previously set aside.

If you do not now grasp healthcare and nursing as one of the core duties of the state, we will unavoidably slide into the care catastrophe, and you will be asked who is responsible for that a once so exemplary healthcare system as that in Germany could be so seriously damaged.

Therefore, do justice to your duty, take responsibility, and appropriate more money for our healthcare system.

Many thanks.

 

[trans: tem]

 

           

 

Thomas Dietz, April 7, 2022, Nursing Bonus

German Bundestag, Plenarprotokoll 20/28, pp. 2470-2471.

Right honorable Frau President. Right honorable ladies and gentlemen.

Today we finally speak of the nursing bonus which now however many nursing staff unfortunately need perceive as an insult. The nursing bonus comes of course precisely at that point in time at which thousands of employees in hospitals, in the nursing area, are working in an occupational condition of vacancy. Vacant because the state brutally intervenes in the right of self-determination of these workers.

Just now thousands of non-vaccinated co-workers must be reported by their employers to health officials. Here it is irrelevant whether these people in past years have performed self-sacrificing action for patients and for that were recently applauded from the gallery. The personal decision to not let themselves be vaccinated has plainly not been made by many of these with a guarantee. Nevertheless, they often witness among the patients that the risks and uses of these injections are in striking disparity.  

Yet now to the nursing bonus, which is about giving back something to people for a performance which they put forward whole-heartedly and with great energy. What requires months to formulate reads like a math exam calculation. I may go briefly into the details.

550 euros shall be alloted to co-workers who work crucially in the direct nursing and attendance of those requiring care. All additional co-workers who are active at the facility receive only 370 euros. This can be, for example, employees in administration, the kitchen or garden and groundskeeping, if they – verbatim – “have been active at least 25 percent of their work time, daily-structured, active attending or caring, in common with those requiring care.”

I ask myself: Who thinks up such numbers? How does the facility administration determine who in garden and groundskeeping spends 25 percent of their work time in common with those requiring care in daily-structured, etc., or not? Does it get more complicated? In every election campaign, one speaks of a necessary deconstruction of bureaucracy. Yet what results when ministerial officials write a law? Almost always a complicated and bureaucratic monster.

Is the government not in a position to formulate a law, for example, of this kind: “The employees who crucially work in the direct care and attendance of patients receive for their activity a tax- and duty-free bonus of 2,500 euros. All other employees who do not work directly with patients or those requiring care, yet who are in any case needed for the maintenance of the facility, receive this bonus pro rata”?

While the armaments industry will now be promoted with 100 billion euros, the Federal Government insults all those who have sacrificed themselves in service to people. Thus does one certainly not increase the attractiveness of the nursing vocation and obviate the nursing emergency. I therefore demand a nursing bonus which is correspondingly worthy of its recipients.

All must receive this bonus and not just those who have worked in a hospital in which in one year more than ten patients infected with the Corona virus have been treated, and these were at times ventilated more than 48 hours – thus it is in the same draft law. What distinguishes one nursing staff which has worked in a hospital in which only nine patients within twelve months were ventilated more than 48 hours from a nursing staff which has worked in a hospital with eleven ventilated patients?

Can this government, which constantly speaks of justice, not simply make an uncomplicated law which thinks of the co-workers? Yet here apparently I am thinking too pragmatically, too close to people. Therefore, please make out of this theoretically well meant law a law good in practice! Then we will with joy vote in favor.

I thank you for your attention.

[trans: tem]