Thousands of doctors in municipal hospitals went on strike on Monday. Exact figures are not available, but it is undisputed that treatments were cancelled or postponed on a massive scale. The Marburger Bund (MB) called for a warning strike in municipal hospitals in order to increase the pressure on municipal employers immediately before the next negotiation session.
The doctors’ union is demanding an 8.5 percent pay increase and new working and shift arrangements. The Association of Municipal Employers’ Associations (VKA) criticized the warning strike as “excessive.” Of the 61,000 doctors in almost 500 municipal clinics nationwide, more than half belong to the MB.
Emergencies also provided during the strike
As is almost always the case during industrial disputes in the health care sector, so-called emergency service agreements between hospital management and the union applied in hospitals: Planned procedures that can be postponed may have been cancelled, but emergencies and time-critical operations were carried out.
Thousands of doctors gathered in Frankfurt am Main, where the MB called for a central demonstration. The focus of the warning strike was Hesse, Bavaria and Lower Saxony, where there are many publicly owned clinics. In Berlin, the state-owned Vivantes hospitals have a contract based on the VKA tariff, The doctors there did not go on strike. But next door, in the Ernst-von-Bergmann Clinic in Potsdam, many doctors stopped working.
Fewer clinics after Lauterbach’s hospital reform
An assistant doctor starts with a gross monthly salary of around 5,300 euros if he works full-time. Religious, non-profit and privately run hospitals are not affected by the collective bargaining round. The university hospitals also have their own collective agreementThere are approximately 1800 hospitals in Germany, and as part of the reforms introduced by Federal Health Minister Karl Lauterbach (SPD), smaller clinics will probably have to merge.
The law stipulates that the federal states are responsible for the technology and buildings of all clinics that are deemed necessary for the provision of care. The health insurance companies, in turn, pay for staff and medication by paying a flat rate per treatment.
