Request for administrative assistance because of the Omikron wave: Berlin clinics are planning with a possible Bundeswehr deployment – Berlin
Berlin clinic managers have asked the Bundeswehr for help in an emergency. Expected staff shortages in the impending Omikron wave could help soldiers in the hospitals with transports and food supplies.
The Tagesspiegel learned this on Thursday from chief physicians. In individual cases, formal requests for administrative assistance have therefore already been made – it is explicitly not about doctors and nurses in the troops, but about technical services.
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“Despite the 22 month corona crisis, our employees are giving everything in this wave too. In an absolute emergency, however, we will call on the Bundeswehr to provide support, ”said Johannes Danckert, head of the state’s own Vivantes clinics, on request. “We have good experiences with the Bundeswehr in 2020 Construction of the emergency clinic on the exhibition grounds did.”
In order to save space and staff for Covid-19 cases, Berlin’s hospitals have mostly postponed planned treatments weeks ago. If massive numbers of employees become infected with the highly contagious Omikron virus variant, clinic managers will restrict further work according to a tiered scheme in order to keep rescue centers, intensive care and Covid-19 wards running.
Distribution key for Omikron patients under discussion
By the weekend at the latest, Berlin’s clinic managers and representatives of the Senate Health Administration want to agree on the key to be used to distribute threatening Omikron cases to the hospitals.
According to Tagesspiegel information, the current players have not yet united. For Covid-19 intensive care patients, a distribution key that was designed under the old Senate is gold-plated – the Charité therefore takes on the most difficult cases due to its special technology.
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Most Omikron patients will probably not receive intensive care when, but there are no binding agreements between the clinics for normal wards.
The fourth corona wave is putting hospitals under pressure – the treatment of severe, contagious lung diseases such as Covid-19 requires a lot of space, staff and technology.
More than 630 Covid-19 patients are currently being cared for in a clinic in Berlin, 200 of them in an intensive care unit. Of these men and women, more than 170 are ventilated, 35 of them by a so-called Ecmo, a high-tech machine for the most serious cases.
There are only a little more than 40 of these Ecmo treatment places in Berlin; they are also used for certain non-corona patients. The above key figures have been largely stable since December. Most of these patients have contracted the delta variant of the coronavirus.