German emergency services suffer from major inefficiencies and wildly different services across the country, according to a new investigation that has raised serious questions in a country with some of the highest numbers of medical personnel in the world.
The investigation released this week by public broadcaster SWR found that only 24 of Germany's 283 emergency service* districts could say that they could reach cardiac arrest cases within eight minutes — the time limit recommended to successfully save someone's life in urban areas. Some 130 said they could not make this target, while the rest could not offer any data. According to SWR, some 10,000 people die in Germany every year whose lives could be saved.
The report also found huge variations in the standards that the different German states impose on their emergency services — while some states, like Hesse, require emergency services to reach patients within 10 minutes of the emergency call, in neighboring Rhineland-Palatinate the target is 19 minutes.
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And yet Germany doesn't appear to lack money for health care — according to the European Commission, the country has the highest healthcare expenditure relative to GDP of any EU country, with 12.8% in 2020, and it has 7.9 beds per 1,000 inhabitants, while the EU average is 5.3. Still, the SWR investigation showed emergency services often find themselves overworked and understaffed.
Janosch Dahmen, health policy spokesperson for the Green........