The situation is tense in the Vorarlberg hospitals, but not as much as in other federal states.
That said on Friday at APA request Gerald Fleisch, Managing Director of the Vorarlberg Hospital Operating Company (KHBG). “Emergency care is guaranteed anyway, as are urgent medical interventions,” Fleisch emphasized. There is a shortage of staff both in nursing and in the medical profession.
3.6 percent of all employees are absent
The lack of care is not fundamentally dramatic, but it has an effect “because it is unequally distributed”. The situation with the doctors is basically good, even if there are two or three departments with difficulties. Fleisch cited the LKH Bregenz as an example. In the hospital in the Vorarlberg state capital, general practitioners help out as freelancers due to bottlenecks in the medical field. Basically, Fleisch noted that only 3.6 percent of all employees were missing. The Vorarlberg hospital operating company employed around 4,700 people last year, including over 800 doctors.
Meat sees distribution issues
Fleisch also does not believe that there are fundamentally too few doctors in Austria. “It’s a distribution issue that needs to be addressed,” he said. The situation is different in nursing. For the KHBG managing director, pool solutions in the respective houses can be an approach in the nursing area. Fleisch does not believe in a lasting improvement in the near future. “The situation will remain,” he said, referring to demographics.
LH “must take money in hand”
The Vorarlberg hospital doctors, for their part, see better pay as the key to adequate staffing at the hospitals – they made that known at a press conference in early April. Money alone is not the solution, but the directly effective means for sufficient staff and thus more time and better working conditions, according to Medical Association Vice-President Hermann Blassnig (Chairman of the salaried doctors). If you want to improve the situation in Vorarlberg quickly and effectively, “the governor has to take the money, just like in Burgenland,” said Blassnig with conviction.
“Understaffed departments are a structural problem”
“Understaffed departments are a structural problem that affects all hospitals across the country,” said Claudia Riedlinger, works council member and senior physician at Bregenz Hospital, who is responsible for creating the duty roster. You are constantly at the limit in terms of personnel, every failure in the team – whether in nursing or with the doctors – causes major problems. Due to the overload, the training of the young doctors is also neglected.
