By Birgit Buerkner
Often she doesn’t see her daughter for most of the month. And if she does, then she just cries, says Thuy-Le Phan (71), mother of a Charité doctor …
Her daughter’s suffering is apparently symbolic of the situation of many doctors at Europe’s largest university hospital.
That’s why Charité doctors at all three locations went on a one-day warning strike on Wednesday – for the first time in 15 years. The posters of the strike participants read phrases like: “Saving lives every day without having one yourself” or “Overtime doesn’t exist if you put it out”.
“Dear Charité, give me my daughter back!” Thuy-Le Phan (71, right), mother of Charité doctor Lam-Thanh Ly (29, left), wrote on a poster. “I hardly see my daughter anymore. Most recently, she worked 17 days straight,” she says. And her daughter: “In gastroenterology it was 80 hours a week” Photo: Siegfried Purschke
“The workload at the Charité makes the doctors sick,” said Peter Bobbert, head of the Marburger Bund doctors’ union, to the BZ “60 to 80 hours a week, 15 on-call times of 16 hours a month are not the exception, but the rule.”
Tim Arnold (40), emergency physician at the Virchow Clinic (Wedding), said: “I love my job. But the current conditions cannot continue. Stress, overwork, lack of recovery – I’m completely broken.” Among other things, the Marburger Bund demands that doctors limit on-call times to four per month, four weeks in advance, and rosters that are secured, as well as 6.9 percent more wages.
Jana Reichardt (30), doctor in the Steglitz emergency room: “Here another night shift, there another visit after a 24-hour service. We have allowed our sense of responsibility to be exploited long enough. I’m faced with the choice of failing this job or getting loud.” Photo: Fabian Sommer/dpa
Union member Jana Reichardt (30) criticized that there had been “attempts at intimidation” prior to the strike. The Charité emphasized that the right to strike would be respected.
Parkinson’s patient Beate Nürnberg (52) from Bernau felt the consequences of the strike: “I was supposed to be admitted to the surgery today and I was sent from ward to ward. It was always: ‘Didn’t they call you?’ Now the procedure has been postponed to November” Photo: Siegfried Purschke
Because of the walkout, some interventions that were not urgently needed had to be postponed. As with Parkinson’s patient Beate Nuremberg (52) from Bernau. “I was supposed to be admitted to surgery today and I was sent from ward to ward,” she says. Now she will be operated in November.