In order to strengthen public health, the federal government introduced a law to the Bundestag on Tuesday to set up a new authority. The authority is to be introduced under the name BIPAM, which stands for Federal Institute for Prevention and Education in Medicine. It is to begin work as early as January 1, 2025. The short-term nature of the project has been criticized in advance.
As announced by the Bundestag, the institute is to “take over the tasks of the Federal Center for Health Education (BZgA) and partly of the Robert Koch Institute (RKI) as an independent federal authority”. It will have its headquarters in Cologne and a branch in Berlin.
As the proposal states, the federal government hopes for a “central authority at federal level to support the networking of public health stakeholders.” The corona pandemic has shown that this is necessary.
The expectation of the new authority is that it will help prevent incapacity for work, early retirement, work-related accidents and the need for care, and thus relieve the burden on social security systems.
To this end, BIPAM should collect and analyze data on the health status of the population, the health impacts of climate and the environment, and health-related behavior.
In addition, it should improve health, crisis and risk communication with the population: “The aim is to give all citizens easy and quick access to easily understandable and target-appropriate health information on diseases, as far as this is within the responsibility of the federal government – and to sensitize them to misinformation.”
The authority responsible for the authority is Karl Lauterbach (SPD) led Federal Ministry of Health. As stated in the proposal, neither citizens nor the economy would incur any so-called “compliance costs”.
For the federal government, this would mean additional expenditure of around 30 million euros for the coming year, primarily for business needs, training and further education of employees, the development, operation and further development of information technology and for specialist tasks. This would result in additional annual expenditure of around 14.5 million euros.
