Innsbruck (OTS) – 23 new training positions are good. You don’t need a large number of system partners to announce this good news. The number of closed beds is still too high, as is the number of overcrowded health insurance practices.
It is somewhat strange what is considered important in Tyrolean health policy and what is obviously less important. When hospital bosses go public, complain about closed beds, say that they even have to send patients who are in pain away or put them off until a later date of surgery, there is no crisis summit, no media dramatization. There is silence in the forest. There is obviously nothing to say on its own.
In contrast, this week ÖVP health councilor Cornelia Hagele brought together all the system partners that could be asked to come to the curtain: the president of the medical association, the management of the Tirol Kliniken, representatives of the Austrian health insurance fund, they were all there, only to have one to present very clear results. Over the next two years, 23 training positions for specialists will be set up in Tyrol to address the shortage of doctors. This is without a doubt a step in the right direction and should be welcomed. Whether a doctor needs analysis was needed for this remains to be seen. The subjects in which there is a lack have become more than clear and painful in recent years. You could have asked parents who couldn’t get an appointment for their child at the children’s clinic, with the pediatrician or a care place at the child and adolescent psychiatry, as well as patients who were waiting forever for an ophthalmologist appointment.
It will take all representatives in the health system to push through the upcoming priorities at the hospitals. Tyrol’s hospitals are producing ever greater losses. This is also due to the fact that some of the houses offer the same services and people have been watching state politics for too long. Hagele’s predecessors in the health department were either in office for too little time or were too clumsy communicatively to set the important course for the future. Now the federal government is setting the direction. By 2025 at the latest, the federal states must eliminate hospital beds and present a structural reform. For the benefit of the patients, one can only hope that Tyroleans are spared initiatives such as the one to close the Natters hospital.
For now, we have to console ourselves with 23 new training positions and hope that, if everything goes well, in six to twelve years we will have 23 new specialists, preferably in statutory health insurance practices, who will contribute to security of supply.
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