Hospital.Help

Berlin – The hospital reform will result in changes to the on-call medical services and requirements for specialist hospitals. This is the result of a first comprehensive amendment to the Hospital Care Improvement Act (KHVVG) by the government factions in the Bundestag, which German Medical Journal (DÄ) are present.

According to the new law, at least one specialist doctor must be available on call at all times so that hospitals can provide the planned service groups in the future. This regulation was not included in the previous cabinet draft of the law.

However, the detailed requirements for material and personnel resources of the service groups in an annex to the law already stipulated that a certain number of specialist doctors would be on call.

Another change is that specialist hospitals will in future be allowed to provide quality criteria that are required for the provision of the assigned service groups in cooperation with other hospitals. Cooperation partners can therefore also be service providers from statutory health insurance.

Previously, it was stipulated that hospitals had to provide related service groups in addition to providing service groups. However, this is often difficult for specialist clinics.

In their statement, the federal states in particular had called for the new exemption option for specialist clinics through cooperation so that specialist clinics can continue to provide medical care in their area in the future. This is a step towards the federal states.

The prerequisite for this exception is that there is a written cooperation agreement and the state authority responsible for hospital planning has determined that the provision of the service groups through cooperation is necessary to ensure comprehensive care.

The 271-page amendment proposal also contains many formulations that reformulate, clarify or regulate previous regulations in detail. The background to this is that the changes were suggested by the Federal Ministry of Justice (BMJ) as part of its “legal and systematic review”.

The BMJ sent a corresponding statement to the Federal Ministry of Health (BMG) at the end of August, a BMJ spokeswoman told the DÄThe Ministry of Justice had approved the KHVVG in the Federal Cabinet in May with reservations; the review of the draft law continued over the summer and was only recently completed.

The BMJ also apparently has no objections to the law not requiring approval. This means that the Bundesrat does not have to approve the law, but can block it by appealing to the Mediation Committee. Some federal states had clearly criticized this approach in advance. © cmk/bee/aerzteblatt.de