Hospital reform Baden-Baden: absurd citizens’ decision against new building

Some call them the “smallest cosmopolitan city in Germany”. It is led in the UNESCO list of the eleven most important course cities in Europe: Baden-Baden. Your story goes back more than 2000 years. None other than the Roman emperor Caracalla had the bathrooms on the hot thermal spring expanded luxuriously, which is why they are still called after him: Caracalla-Therme.

Tsar, kings, duke, composers, writers in Baden-Baden. Fjodor Dostojewski gambled his money in the world -famous casino in the 19th century and wrote his novel “The Player” here. In the Festspielhaus, musicians like Lang Lang or Anne Sophie Mutter are guest today, and exhibitions of the most important artists of our time take place in the Frieda Burda Museum.

No wonder that the Baden-Baden-Baden have a hay look down on the rural-industrial towns and villages in the area. This is the only way to explain what has brought the minds of many citizens to the past few years.

Of all people, Baden-Baden should lose his hospital. The city council of the city wants that. This is what the green-black state government, which has been driving a hospital reform for many years-long before Karl Lauterbach became Federal Minister of Health-that could serve as a blueprint for Germany. Fewer beds, more outpatient rays, less costs, that is the goal. Three locations are to be closed and all medical services will be bundled in one place in the future. With higher supply quality than before.

What a humiliation, however, that the state -of -the -art hospital, which is to be built over the next ten years, should be in the district of the Rastatt district. A world -famous spa town without its own clinic? Unthinkable! Rastatt! Who already knows that? Rastatt! For the proudest among the Baden Baden, it was a terrible idea that in the passports of their children and grandchildren born in the future, the melodious, respectful name of the spa town would appear. The real Baden-Badeners die out, that must not be!

And so you have founded the “Yes! To Baden-Baden” citizens’ initiative, which defends the current location of the largest of the three houses in the Mittelbaden Clinic with all arguments that you can get hold of. The actors who appear publicly are a hotelier, an innkeeper and a resident orthopedist. Behind them are the parties AfD, FDP and “Free citizens for Baden-Baden”, they come together at 13 out of 40 seats in the local council.

The beautiful argument with the place of birth has been done, because the ice -cold hospital planners came up with a particularly nasty trick to pacify the minds: a “braided swap”. A few square meters on the Münchfeldsee, where the new clinic is to be built and where leisure kickers are still training on a few soccer fields today, Baden-Baden are then added. Exactly above this area there will be a delivery room in which real Baden-Badeners can still be born.

But in the citizens’ initiative you are not embarrassed for other arguments. The Münchfeldsee is contaminated with industrial matters that are hazardous to health, according to the website. The dangerous tiger mosquito brows here (could be, the pests have been breeding in large parts of southern Baden-Württemberg). There is a risk of flooding for heavy rain that there will be no parking spaces that the place is badly connected, in short: everyone who has been planning the hospital reform for many years would have done everything wrong that the report was incorrect and outdated, and it was also much cheaper to renovate and estimate the ailing Baden-Baden hospital.

It doesn’t matter if funding from the country is lost in estimated 350 million euros, about half of the construction sum of a good 700 million euros. Layla Distler from the Ministry of Social Affairs, Health and Integration Baden-Württemberg confirms the intention to support, but not the exact sum.

No matter that the spa town is almost bankrupt and nobody has an idea where the money for parking, ongoing construction projects and road renovations should come from, let alone for a comprehensive renovation of the clinic.

No matter that the chief physicians of the old house stand behind the plans in an open letter.

Regardless of the fact that the hospital manager Felix Brenneisen and Thomas Iber come to explanation if you have job interviews with highly qualified doctors for your house who want to ask for the latest technical equipment and operating rooms with robotics and know when it is so far with the new building.

No! The main thing is that the hospital stays in Baden-Baden. It was always like that, it always has to be!

This Sunday is the showdown, the Baden-Badeners are asked to vote. In the pedestrian zone, the supporters and opponents of the Münchfeldsee location have built information stands and advertise the favor of the citizens.

The chief physicians are there to answer questions, and the managers of Brenneisen and Iber are also on site more often. If the opponents of the Münchfeldsee location win, this does not mean that the hospital in Baden-Baden will continue, says Brennisen. “This only means that our plans for the next three years would be blocked.” The mayor of Baden-Baden would be forced to follow the will of the community, but the decision about the new location is still responsible for the elected municipal councils of Baden-Baden and Rastatt.

And so it could be that the smallest cosmopolitan city in Germany is playing a role back into the past and falls completely unnecessarily into finance chaos – while in the largest cosmopolitan city in Germany, Berlin, a freshly started Minister of Health is fighting on all fronts to keep the healthcare sector affordable and further promote the hospital reform.