FOR MORE THAN two months now, the strike by staff at the university hospitals of North Rhine-Westphalia has been going on. They are not even asking for higher wages, but for more staff. But that is obviously the hardest thing to achieve. The story is brought by Deutsche Welle.

“We are not asking for higher wages, but for more staff,” Dominik Stark, a medical technician in the intensive care unit of the University Hospital in Cologne, told broadcaster WDR. “With this strike, we want to achieve more staff in hospitals so that we finally have more time to provide patients with professional care.”

From the service workers' union ver.di, which called for the strike by medical staff with the exception of doctors, it is heard that the strike is of “unlimited” duration. That means it will not end until the main demands are met: opening new jobs in hospitals and thereby relieving employees – and that in all areas, not just those who work with patients.

The only concession the union was prepared to make was an agreement with hospital managements that ensures patient safety. The employees are on strike, but a plan for duty rosters and priorities is still agreed upon.

10,000 surgical procedures postponed

But that by no means means that hospitals can operate as usual: according to the union, in the six university hospitals of the state, 1,800 hospital beds cannot be staffed, and more than 50 entire wards have been closed. “More than 10,000 surgical procedures across North Rhine-Westphalia had to be postponed because of the strike,” says Jochen Werner, medical director of the University Hospital in Essen.

This professor of otorhinolaryngology not only understands the strikers' demands but also supports them in principle: “Clinic directors have long seen the increasing burden on employees, especially those responsible for patient care,” says Werner. “However, it must be said that the increase in workload does not affect only medicine, but has been visible for a whole series of years in industry and service activities as well. The current situation at airports shows this particularly clearly,” says the professor.

But criticism is also heard: “The university hospitals are negotiating with the union and there is actually a fine tradition of not striking while negotiations are ongoing. That is not being respected here,” Roland Goldbrunner, head of the neurosurgery center at the University Hospital in Cologne, told WDR. “I do not know why patients with tumors must continue to suffer.”

100 days for an agreement, otherwise…

North Rhine-Westphalia, with its 18 million inhabitants, is the most populous state in Germany. It has six university clinics and all of them have been on strike since the beginning of May. These hospitals are also among the largest employers: they employ a total of around 60,000 people in various professions.

But even according to employment contracts there are differences: doctors are generally employees of the university, while the rest of the staff – from nurses and physiotherapists to office and support staff – are employees of the state, that is, this federal state.

“For years we kept quiet and tried to maintain a system that is bad,” says Anuschka Mucha, a nurse at the hospital in Cologne. And in the pandemic everything became even worse.

She herself was one of more than 700 employees of the university hospitals in Aachen, Bonn, Düsseldorf, Essen, Cologne and Münster who gathered on January 19, 2022, at two video conferences where it was decided to begin collective bargaining in order to reduce work pressure on employees.

Hospital managements and politicians were given a deadline of 100 days within which a collective agreement with the service workers' union ver.di was to be concluded. It calls for binding regulations for relief in all areas of work and measures to improve the quality of professional training, but also measures if what was agreed is not respected. After the deadline expired on May 1, the strike began.

Testimonies of “factory work” in hospitals

The employees are thus actually following the example of their colleagues from the Berlin clinics Charité and Vivantes, who last year managed through multi-week strikes to achieve collective agreements that both improve employees' conditions and increase wages.

In addition to occasional street protests, readings from the “Black Book on Patient Safety” are also organized by the strikers – authentic testimonies of hospital staff about failures in treatment: “Those, partly dramatic reports are not exceptions, but part of everyday life. The aim of that reading is to show the situation because of which not only patients, but also staff in hospitals must suffer,” says Anuschka Mucha.

Stefanie Schumacher has been a nurse for 30 years and has worked in intensive care in Cologne for 20 years. Especially during the pandemic, it seemed to her as if she were working on an assembly line in a factory, and she would go home both exhausted and dissatisfied because she knew she had not helped patients as she had learned and as she could. She testifies about patients who died in solitude and whom, even after their death, no one took care of until rigor mortis set in. “Even a year and a half later, I still feel guilty,” says this nurse.

Everyone agrees, but there is no agreement

The local media report only in passing on the strike that has already lasted more than two months, although it has, as experts say, caused an “acute threat” to healthcare in this state. The state health minister The media report very little on the strike that has lasted more than two months, and which, as experts say, has led to an “acutely threatening situation” in healthcare in North Rhine-Westphalia.

The responsible state health minister Karl-Josef Laumann (CDU) actually supports the demands of the employees of the university hospitals and stated that the state government also wants to achieve a collective agreement. But he points out that the enormous problem is finding qualified medical staff at all.

And in the parliament of the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, practically all parties support the strikers' demands and want to relieve them in their everyday work. Elections were recently held in this state, and one of the first decrees of the new coalition government of Christian Democrats and Greens at the end of June was the creation of a legal basis for an agreement with the strikers. But there is still no agreement, and the strike continues.

Source: index.hr