DGAP-News

RHÖN-KLINIKUM Aktiengesellschaft: RHÖN-KLINIKUM AG Proves to be Reliable Regarding Challenges in COVID-19 Pandemic - Seite 2

Many COVID-19 patients were often cared for over several weeks, even months, at our five sites providing university hospital medical care as well as at those providing maximum and intermediate medical care.
The additional strict protective measures had to apply to all of the patients even if they did not all receive intensive medical care.

This expense was and still is not taken into account in the remuneration system of flat rates per case.
The higher material and staffing costs are in no way offset by corona-related additional payments received. Likewise, it was not taken into account when clinics could only partially utilise wards due to the isolation of COVID-19 patients and had to postpone treatments for patients with other diseases. "All this has led and continues to lead to a considerable economic burden for our clinics and jeopardises the assurance of satisfactory patient care. The compensation payments for bed capacities that have been kept free, which are subject to bureaucratic and irrelevant hurdles, do not cover our costs at all," Dr Höftberger stated.

In particular the needs of university hospitals as well as those providing maximum and intermediate medical care, to which all RHÖN-KLINIKUM facilities belong, were left completely disregarded. On a supraregional basis we take special care of patients with extremely complex courses of disease. "The criterion for assessing the compensation payments is based on the incidence values for individual areas.
It fails to recognise the scope of the corresponding care given by hospitals with large, supraregional catchment areas and is a completely unsuitable means of assessment," Dr Höftberger remarked.

Appeal for a National Policy: Full Compensation for Revenue Shortfalls and Planning Security

In principle we welcome the current commitment of the German Chancellor and the first ministers of the federal states to safeguard hospital revenues for the entire year 2021, but we also wish to emphasise that the value of this declaration of intent must be measured against the criteria of pragmatism, overall commitment and the speed of the actual implementation.