As at the peak of the corona pandemic, the Charité is postponing all planned interventions. Hundreds of patients are currently receiving appointment cancellations. The reason is a high level of sick leave among doctors and nurses and an increased need in the children’s wards.
Due to an acute shortage of staff, Europe’s largest university clinic goes into emergency operation. According to a press release, the Charité will have to cancel all postponable interventions by the end of the year. The reason given by the clinic was a “persistent and increasing absence of doctors and nursing staff due to illness”. Urgent treatments such as time-critical tumor operations, transplants, heart attack cases or stroke patients would continue to be carried out.
The restrictions are also necessary in order to be able to use additional employees in the children’s wards, the Charité further announced. Also because of the rampant wave with the respiratory syncytial virus (also RS virus or RSV) there is an increased need there. The effects can be felt not only in Berlin, but throughout Germany: In many German clinics there has been a lack of beds in pediatric wards for weeks because so many children with influenza or RS virus infections have to be admitted.
According to information from the “Tagesspiegel”, the Charité emergency operation affects a third of all treatments. In the worst case, that would mean: Hundreds of appointments per day are postponed. They would all have to be made up for after the crisis. Affected patients are currently being notified by the clinic, the newspaper reported.
The current procedure is comparable to that in the corona pandemic, when the intensive care units in Berlin were assigned to three “levels”. As Level I, the Charité treated the most severe cases. 16 clinics were responsible for Level II, including the state-owned Vivantes hospitals, which also cared for severe Covid 19 patients. Level III clinics took care of intensive care cases that were not infected with Sars-Cov-2. And the announced emergency operation itself is reminiscent of the pandemic: the Charité had also postponed all operations that could be planned at the height of the corona crisis.
