Lack of care: Can hospitals maintain quality?
politics
Experts say that the lack of care in Salzburg’s hospitals has reached alarming proportions. There is also a shortage of staff in hospitals. In addition, there is a shortage of staff in retirement homes, which means that patients who are actually healthy again have to stay in hospitals. Because they can’t find a place in a home.
More than a hundred beds are currently unoccupied in the Salzburg state clinics. In addition, around 30 beds are blocked by recovering patients. Due to the lack of staff in Salzburg retirement homes, these cannot and must not be removed from the clinic and transferred. Clinic manager Paul Sungler says that there are currently around 5,000 days with incorrect allocations. That’s quite dramatic.”
State of alarm also with the “brothers”
The situation is no different in the Hospital of the Brothers of Mercy in the city of Salzburg: Here, too, there are currently between five and ten patients who cannot be disposed of because there is a lack of staff in care facilities outside of the hospital. There is also a staff shortage in the clinic itself – that beds are not being closed & this is solely due to the fact that 31 of the 230 beds are currently not available anyway due to renovations.
Worst case: “Standard cannot be maintained”
The hospital director Arno Buchacher is convinced that the shortage of staff, especially in nursing, will have massive effects: “I’m afraid that we have to accept that the current standard may no longer be maintained.” Nursing staff is also scarce in the other Salzburg hospitals. The employee market has been swept empty, there are not enough trained specialists, says Buchacher. Of the 160 training positions at the Salzburg University of Applied Sciences for qualified nursing staff, only around 120 are currently occupied.