“Our lemon has been squeezed”: Swiss children’s hospitals face financial collapse

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The message is clear. Rising costs, too few places for young patients and a reform to save costs. Swiss children’s hospitals are threatened with financial collapse.

The children’s hospitals in Switzerland are at their financial limit, confirms Marco Fischer (55), chairman of the Alliance of Children’s Hospitals of Switzerland and CEO of the University Children’s Hospital in Basel. “It doesn’t look good, we are hugely in the red.” And he adds in an interview with the CH-Media newspapers: “The lemon has been squeezed for us.”

Hospitals must take budget cuts into account

The children’s hospitals would have had to make huge pay increases and cost-of-living adjustments. This is partly due to the shortage of trained personnel. In addition, there are rising costs for materials, medicines and energy. At the same time, rates remained the same, Fischer says.

Now the federal government is also implementing a cost-saving reform. In concrete terms, he wants to standardize the rules for setting rates and make hospitals more efficient. The so-called benchmark for calculating remuneration to hospitals should be at the 30th percentile. In concrete terms, this means: 70 percent of hospitals that offer their services at a higher price should expect cuts.

Open letter to Minister of Health Berset

The hospital associations H+, Allkids and unimeduisse are taking action and calling for the suspension of the reform in an open letter to Federal President Alain Berset (51). Because they see it as nothing less than an “existential threat to medical care in Switzerland”.

Fischer blows the same horn. He says in the interview that these reform corrections were not thought through to the end. A hospital must be able to invest, develop new treatment options and respond to them. But: “If you completely eliminate the money supply, the money supply is jeopardized to some extent.” (oko)

Source:Blick