The story of German Health Minister Jens Spahn and Judith Heepe, the director of health care at Charite Hospital in Berlin, bears little resemblance to the story of the rabbit and the hedgehog. Heepe, like the cunning hedgehog, is somehow always faster.
In September 2019, Spahn was in Mexico, signing a contract to speed up the process for medical staff in Mexico to receive work permits in Germany. Heepe had already been there. A month earlier, Spahn had sent his secretary of state to the Philippines on a recruitment mission. Heepe had been there too.
In the Brothers Grimm’s fairy tale, the rabbit thinks: it’s not possible. Judith Heepe sees the funny side as she recounts her imaginary competition with Spahn. In the race to recruit medical staff from abroad, you have to be extremely creative. And sometimes you take matters into your own hands.
“The international healthcare staff has brought warmth and openness,” says Judith Heepe
For more than five years, Heepe has led the healthcare division at Charite, the oldest hospital in Berlin and the most famous in Germany. She is responsible for 4,600 staff members and, during the second wave of the pandemic, they worked under pressure every day, especially the intensive care nurses in COVID-19.
Strive to recruit nurses in Germany
If the pandemic had broken out four years ago, Charite would probably have had to admit defeat. “At that time, we were short of 400 nurses. Every year we covered this gap of 100 workers and expanded our training capacity at the same time,” says Heepe.
Therefore, not only did he fly to Mexico and the Philippines, but he was also in Albania and made approaches in South America. Charite soon wants to bring Brazilian nurses to Germany. “The German market is completely dry,” she says. According to the German Interdisciplinary Association for Intensive and Emergency Medicine (DIVI), the country does not have around 3,500 to 4,000 skilled workers in intensive care.
Politicians are constantly asking Heepe how the situation turned out. “I can only tell them that this situation is our fault. In recent years there have simply not been enough trained and qualified people. Now we have what was a totally avoidable gap in the next four or five years,” she says. It is an emergency that could cost Germany dearly in the coming weeks, with intensive care units overcrowded due to the pandemic. “It also means we have to pay people better,” says Heepe.
Fights with officials and bureaucracy
Heepe is someone who does things. Her motto: Don’t take no for an answer.
“At one point, I was more familiar with the State Office for Health and Social Affairs than I ever wanted to be,” she says with a laugh. She always had to discuss the requirements of the office for foreign nurses to provide original documents. Her relationship with the health authorities in Berlin has a history: it happened almost three years ago, half a world away in Mexico. And Heepe can still remember every detail.
“I was in a video conference with 15 Mexicans who were in complete despair because their recruitment company had collapsed,” she recalls. “And then I said, ‘Who cares? We can do it! We bring you here! “
For Heepe, this marked the beginning of an annoying side job. She took on everything the agencies would normally handle, from visas and flights to official relations, bank accounts and health insurance, to language courses. And sometimes, when the whole project was looking at risk because of the German bureaucracy, it took unconventional measures.
“I say to my German colleagues: ‘You have everything here. You don’t have to emigrate, “says Mexican nurse Herbert Perez
A suitcase full of documents
In April 2018, Herbert Perez boarded a plane from Mexico City to Berlin with a suitcase and a backpack. Charite had paid for the flight. In the backpack were two pairs of trousers, three T-shirts and two shirts. In the suitcase: all the original paper documents for the 15 Mexican nurses who wanted to work in Germany. The young indigenous nurse from the southern state of Oaxaca with the German first name became the avant-garde; he had in his luggage everything the Berlin officials demanded.
“The scales at the airport looked exactly 22.5 kilograms,” Perez recalls. “At the last minute, people were still coming to the airport to file documents.” The nurse may laugh now when she thinks of her first trip to Germany, but at the time it was a nervous wreck.
“What would happen if I forgot something in the middle of the hustle or bustle or lost documents in transit or if the airlines made a mistake and the suitcase disappeared?” All these thoughts went through his head. But everything worked. Today, following a six-month program to certify his accreditation, Perez is a valued colleague. He works in the coronavirus intensive care unit and helps bring Germany through the crisis every day.
Dramatic situations in intensive care units
“The current situation is extremely critical, there are only a few intensive care beds,” says Perez. “At the moment we are reaching the limits of our capabilities.” He himself has already tested his limits – like many nurses, he contracted the coronavirus and lay in bed with a fever for a week.
Perez has wanted to be a nurse since he was a child. He is the kind of person who needs to be told when to slow down. Even today, he is surprised whenever his colleagues tell him that he needs to relax, that he is entitled to a vacation or days off. “I didn’t know such things in Mexico, you have fewer rights there as a worker.”
Heepe organizes everything for Perez’s partner, a preschool teacher, to join him soon in Berlin and start working at Charite Kindergarten.
An international success story, then, with only winners? Not realy. There is growing criticism that Germany is resuming well-trained staff in developing countries, when necessary, and in their countries of emergency. A recent report in the German newspaper Frankfurter Rundschau he spoke of “nursing imperialism.”
“Germany has to solve its own healthcare problem”
The German Interdisciplinary Association for Intensive and Emergency Medicine (DIVI) is familiar with these allegations. Experts agree: Germany’s healthcare shortage is a country’s problem and, in an emergency, such as the current coronavirus pandemic, other countries should not be weakened.
“Bringing in qualified staff from abroad always sounds like the big answer to the problem. But the more you investigate it, the less it seems like an answer,” said Michael Isfort, deputy chairman of the board of the German Institute for Healthcare Research. Applied. The proportion of foreign healthcare staff in the hospital sector is currently around 1%. “That’s extremely small.”
Nurses like Herbert Perez go mainly to big cities like Berlin; according to Isfort, 90-95% of international staff work in large urban centers. “We have not yet been able to bring care workers from abroad to rural areas,” he says.
According to experts, it is clear that recruiting staff from abroad will not be the long-term solution for the German medical emergency.
This article was translated from German.