Magdeburg/Berlin (dpa/sa) – In Germany, clinics that offer obstetrics or pediatric and youth medicine are to be financially better equipped than before. Saxony-Anhalt’s Health Minister Petra Grimm-Benne is pleased with this project. “We managed to get started with the hospital reform,” said the SPD politician to the German Press Agency. “It’s about short-term help.” Grimm-Benne is currently Chair of the Conference of Health Ministers.
The Bundestag passed a legislative package on Friday. It provides for an additional 300 million euros each for children’s hospitals in 2023 and 2024. To secure obstetrics locations, it is 120 million euros more each. Financing should also become more independent of the current performance-oriented logic. Grimm-Benne expects that the obstetrics departments in Sangerhausen, Halberstadt, Wittenberg, Stendal and Salzwedel in particular will benefit from this.
Hospital financing is organized in two ways in Germany: while the federal states are responsible for investments, the hospital treatments are reimbursed by the health insurance companies with flat rates per case. The hospitals receive fixed allocations, called DRGs, for each patient and diagnosis. Critics complain that the reimbursement system puts hospitals under pressure to increase operations in profitable areas and often to reduce loss-making departments such as pediatric and adolescent medicine or obstetrics.
