By Lydia Rosenfelder
Federal Health Minister Karl Lauterbach (59, SPD) is planning a major hospital reform. But it is at the expense of midwives, pregnant women and newborns.
Then: From 2025, midwives will no longer be allowed to be billed via hospital care budgets.
The result: Instead of midwives, hospitals would have to use normal nurses on the wards. But midwives are also urgently needed by mothers and their offspring there. Pulling them off would have dire consequences.
That is why the coalition partner FDP wants to stop Lauterbach. “We think that’s a mistake,” writes the care policy spokeswoman for the FDP parliamentary group, Nicole Westig, in a statement (exclusively available to BILD). “This does not create any incentives to bring more midwives into inpatient care.”
Westig warns of a weakening of obstetrics. Because this not only includes care during the birth, but also before and after it. “Therefore, the Free Democrats believe that removing midwives from the care budget is wrong.”
The fact is: The exclusion of midwives from the care budget affects an already weakened health sector. “The elimination of many delivery rooms and obstetric departments leads to a significant increase in workload in the remaining delivery rooms,” says Westig.
The result: Expectant mothers have to wait and can only be transferred to the delivery room later in the birth process. Westig demands that care by a midwife should be possible even in the early phase of birth. The Ministry of Health should “take measures to increase and not reduce the number of midwives in the relevant wards”.
Criticism wave at Lauterbach
In addition: The lack of maternity wards also means that more women with high-risk pregnancies end up in clinics that are not at all suitable for this. And a woman who has to give birth to her child with insufficient care may not have a second child.
Westig: Lauterbach’s plan “also thwarts the goal of good and comprehensive care for pregnant women and jeopardizes the implementation of 1:1 care”.
Tomorrow the hearing of the hospital care relief law will take place in the health committee of the Bundestag. The Greens are also against Lauterbach’s plan for midwives. The German Association of Midwives will also appear in the Bundestag, for days it has been up in arms against “the irresponsible weakening of clinical obstetrics”. A petition against the reform on change.org has already garnered over 1.2 million supporters.