United in Crisis: Groundbreaking Plan to Standardize Emergency Services Across the Board
If your health becomes critical, ambulances and emergency doctors should be there quickly. But there are flaws and problems in the overloaded system. Now reform plans are becoming firm.
According to the plans of the traffic lights coalition, there will be uniform national standards for the rescue service to provide rapid assistance in emergencies. “The protection of life, limb and health must not depend on the zip code,” Green Party health expert Janosch Dahmen told the German Press Agency. In the future, a quality committee that includes states and health insurance companies should ensure that “people everywhere can rely on the same high quality of care, uniform standards and collaborative interfaces.”
The coalition wants to include the reorganization of the emergency service in a proposed law for the reform of emergency care in clinics and practices, as announced by the Minister of Health, Karl Lauterbach (SPD). A draft which is now available provides for the establishment of the rescue service as an independent service area. This means that reimbursement of the costs for this “will not be made dependent on the operation of transport in the sense of travel costs,” according to the draft of the coalition factions, which is available to the dpa.
Dahmen explained that with the inclusion of the rescue service in the social security code, a well-founded and differentiated regulation would finally be created. “In this way, we ensure that sensible new care proposals from the emergency services, such as the use of tele-emergency doctors, community emergency paramedics or greater collaboration between several control centres, are adequately funded in the future .”
In order to ensure national minimum standards, according to the draft, a “quality committee” should be established in the Federal Ministry of Health. It should have four members each based on proposals from the states and the statutory health insurance companies. The committee, which is independent of instructions, should publish a catalog with recommendations on structures and processes: for example on staff qualifications and control center equipment, which also includes “tele-emergency doctors” to support professional patient care.
Standards should also be developed for automated emergency call locating and for software-supported inquiry systems for emergency calls. The committee should also deal with the promotion of lay first aid and the involvement of registered first aiders through mobile alarm apps. The focus is also on using standardized and networked software in control centers across district and state boundaries.
The background is long standing problems and overload. The Björn Steiger Foundation called for improvements in the more than 240 control centers across the country. They would have to use standard query algorithms, with quality assurance, to determine whether an emergency call involved a minor case or a matter of life and death. Technical support and larger organizational units are also necessary – for example to be able to implement instructions for resuscitation. Until now there have been control centers where two people sometimes sit at night.
Dahmen said warnings from experts had been ignored for years. “The result is overburdened emergency rooms and emergency services, rising costs and often only average quality of care.” The reform ensures that even those who do not require transport or hospitalization receive good care through specialist services such as tele-emergency medicine, urgent care teams and psychiatric emergency services.