Federal Minister of Health Lauterbach wants to reform the healthcare system: One proposal is that there are hospitals that are managed entirely by nurses. He is also planning innovations with regard to the procurement of medicines.
Federal Minister of Health Karl Lauterbach wants to give nursing staff more responsibility. “I wish that in the future we would have nurses here who also work more like doctors,” he said in an interview with “Zeit”. Hospital care needs to be improved urgently. Lauterbach referred to the USA, where “particularly well-trained nurses do a lot of things that family doctors do here.”
In Germany, the doctors’ lobby resists any transfer of powers to the nursing staff. The Minister of Health is planning a major hospital reform. Among other things, the proposals envisage setting up hospitals that do not have employed doctors and are managed entirely by nursing staff.
Lauterbach is also planning a new legal regulation to overcome the supply bottlenecks for medicines. “We are therefore working on a law that will ensure that medicines have to be procured in several regions of the world at the same time so that we are no longer dependent on one or two factories worldwide,” he told Die Zeit. In the future, “the cheapest provider should no longer be the only one to be awarded the contract, but those who offer more security of supply”.
Lauterbach criticized the strong focus on profitability in many areas of the healthcare system. “We have gone too far,” said the minister. This applies not only to the supply of medicines, but also to medical practices, which are increasingly being taken over by investors and where there is now a threat of cheap mass processing. “We have to end discounter medicine,” he demands.
