Three quarters of the hospital doctors in Vienna complain about a high or very high workload. The biggest factor is the lack of staff in nursing, followed by bureaucratic activities.
75 percent of hospital doctors in Vienna complain about a high or very high workload. Three quarters are “permanently burdened,” said Vienna Medical Association Vice President Stefan Ferenci on Tuesday about the current survey. The biggest factor is the lack of staff in nursing, followed by bureaucratic activities. The Medical Association demanded better framework conditions from the Viennese politicians. Ferenci warned that when a medic is overtired, they are more likely to make mistakes.
The results are “anything but encouraging, even from the point of view of the social researcher,” emphasized Peter Hajek by the Institute Public Opinion Strategies, which commissioned the survey. Among the 41 percent of Viennese hospital doctors who rate their workload as very high were 40 to 49 year olds and full-time employees, he reported.
Too few nursing staff
54 percent state the lack of nursing staff as a very stressful aspect of everyday work, 44 percent state organizational or bureaucratic activities. The shortage of medical staff was mentioned only in third place, just behind. Adding these three points together results in “of course only limited time for the patients,” explained Hajek, which in turn was the fourth most frequently mentioned factor for the workload in the survey, followed by the effects of the corona pandemic.
The high stress leads to high job dissatisfaction and health problems such as burnout, and doctors would look for other jobs, Ferenci said. The chairman of the Curia employed doctors criticized above all the many bureaucratic tasks that his colleagues had to take over. They wouldn’t have studied medicine for that.
“Waste of Resources”
“It’s frustrating and a waste of resources when a doctor has to look for a vacant bed instead of treating patients.” This is not the task of a nurse, who is also highly qualified for other activities, emphasized the representative of the Medical Association. Ferenci criticized that as the burden of bureaucratic activities increased, the “queue of patients grew bigger and bigger”. It’s about “waiting times of not two hours, not three hours, but up to seven hours,” he reported.
“The alarm bells in the hospitals are ringing louder than the Pummerin on New Year’s Eve,” said Ferenci. The hospital doctors are not at the limit, but in some cases “already above it”, even though the survey was carried out from the end of September to the beginning of October, i.e. “after the summer, when the staff is usually most relaxed,” he explained. In addition, according to Hajek, there are worrying survey results on overtime by hospital doctors, around 50 percent of whom “cannot quite keep to their statutory rest periods”.
The medical association demands “that politicians do everything to improve the situation”. A “profound structural reform” and immediate measures are needed. Ferenci, for example, advised a pool of freelancers to step in when there is an increased need for staff due to a virus wave or sick leave. From the first part of the results of the survey, the Medical Association had already reported in November that 84 percent of hospital doctors in Vienna identified ongoing and lasting quality losses in patient care.
Vienna City Councilor for Health Peter Hacker (SPÖ) demanded the medical association – in the ORFbroadcast “Vienna Today” – to return to the negotiating table and put forward their proposals there. The overall contract is currently being negotiated, which is the right platform for the demands of the medical association, said Hacker, and reiterated his accusation that the chamber was running a campaign against the Viennese hospitals.
Hacker defended the order of the Vienna Health Association that the hospitals in the federal capital only treat guest patients in exceptional cases. This is one of the many “small building blocks” that have to be set to relieve the burden on health workers. Of course, Vienna meets its partly existing supra-regional supply responsibility – for example in the case of special treatments that only exist here. But in principle this decision is “of course” legally compliant, countered criticism from hackers, for example from Lower Austria. It is not clear how long this measure will be maintained, and developments will be monitored over the next few months.
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