Jens Spahn: We want to improve the working conditions for the nurses

MIL OSI Translation. Region: Germany / Germany –

Source: CDU, CSU,

Madam President, Ladies and gentlemen, In the health, care policy, we solve, what we agreed at the beginning of this coalition together, and focus on the substantive work. We have announced to bring together, in the first six months of the three packages on the way to improve the supply in Germany, concretely in everyday life. This nursing staff-strengthening act, which we are debating today in the first reading, this is a very important part.

It comes to concrete improvements in the care, concrete improvements in the Situation in which people realize, must realize, in everyday life without support, no longer get through to need help to need care during the everyday Do. This is a serious finding for the patient itself, but also, of course, for the family, for the family members. This is especially a Situation that can affect every time, either as a patient, as a parent of dependent children, as a child of elderly parents, or to the private Partner, of the is to maintain. The theme is now arrived in every family.

A – this is the truth: This blow of fate, it means to be in need of care, we can’t wegreformieren. If at once, because man can no longer climb the stairs, a nursing bed in the living room, which is in many families, the case is altered quite a lot in the family life. Now it is a question that we, as a society, is the help, for which we have established long-term care insurance as a social security 20 years ago – these families. We can’t undo it, but we can help, as well as it goes: support in everyday life through outpatient services, nursing care, by financial recognition in as many Places as possible.

I think this is exactly the task we want to tackle with this nursing staff,-strengthening of the law: people who are in need of nursing, patients and their carers in the practical life, to help in practical everyday life. We compete, and this law is an important building block.

(Applause from the CDU/CSU as well as from members of the SPD)

There are many nurses who say: intense encounters of this trade with the fact that it supports people, particularly in the elderly, often on the last life that you will experience a very intimate, very personal, very existential situations, even strength, even by what you get back from the people, the care, the support.

It is so, that these encounters, this force help also thanks to the efforts of everyday life. That’s why I think it’s important that we talk to all the problems that we have in focus, even on this beautiful, power pages that give this profession.

But these efforts, and Overloads are all too often too much. If a service plans life often with the family go together, if you have worked twelve days in a row, layer, had, actually, a few days off, but the call comes “A colleague/a colleague has failed. Can you fill in?“ – of course you will – if it is a physical or mental long-term load, if too much work is distributed on little shoulders – this can be the Situation, how it has evolved to often – not everywhere, but too often – in hospitals, in elderly care, outpatient as well as inpatient, and we control very specifically, against: with 13 000 new Places in residential care for the elderly, with the promise of, and the statutory implementation of that any additional care in the hospitals is fully funded and set that we can refinance from this year, starting in 2018, tariff increases in the care in the hospitals that we outsource in a next step, the maintenance budget, so the cost of care of a hospital, in the cost of financing the transfer, from the case-base.

With all of this – promotion of occupational health, supporting the investment in digitization in the care, which is by the way also help straight-outpatient care services – we want to improve working conditions in the care. We want to very specifically that can be felt: Yes, there are more colleagues. Yes, the pay is improving. – Also this is a topic we are working on. I think most of the nurses have none of it, if there’s a contest going “Who offers more?” and the Numbers 50 000, 80 000, 120 000 nurses and billion only in this way fly through the air. The have something like this, if we can improve in the daily life of the things, and that is exactly what we are proposing with this law. This is exactly the part that makes then at the end of the things better and help regain your confidence.

(Applause from the CDU/CSU as well as from members of the SPD)

We want to improve the working conditions so that nurses who have dropped out of care, say for whatever reason – frustration, family, and other reasons, it may: I return to this profession. – We need everyone. The care labour market is deserted in the whole of Germany.

(Pia Zimmermann [LEFT]: Poor working conditions, little money!)

But we want to also apply to those – because I want to pick up something from the last week – working part-time, often because of the family. In many personal encounters, they tell me, however, that I did, because the work conditions are such that work load is not so that I can do so many hours in the week. – Therefore, it is important that we improve the working conditions, the payment for improve – we are working on the concerted action of care, that care workers who have gone for these reasons, part-time, to say: Yes, it will be better

From this, some have made a campaign. Some speakers will respond to it – that’s why I want to address it and say: The Minister just want the nurses to work more. – Then there was the same indignation, a Shitstorm. You ladies and gentlemen know if this is the level on which we lead the debate on the question of how we can improve for hundreds of thousands of nurses in this country, the working conditions, then it will only produce disappointment and frustration, but in the end did not help. Because I think that is the question of how working conditions can actually improve for people who work part-time because they say: “Otherwise it is too tiring under the present working conditions”, is quite legitimate. We should answer specifically, rather than getting anywhere indignation.

(Applause from the CDU/CSU as well as from members of the SPD and the FDP)

Ladies and gentlemen, Madam President, with this bill, the nursing staff-strengthening the law, we put in many of the areas we want to improve the working conditions in concrete terms, and use it to send, I think, a strong Signal, even through the next consultations in the coming months. The policy of the Federal government, but also this coalition, the Situation of the nurses in the hospital, in inpatient and outpatient care. We want to improve specifically.

(Applause from the CDU/CSU as well as from members of the SPD)

MIL OSI

EDITOR’S NOTE: This article is a translation. Please forgive us should the grammar and/or sentence structure need be perfect.