Emergency care: Why it often takes until help comes

One of the first victims of the government accident last November was the reform of emergency care. “On the morning of November 6, 2024, there was an expert hearing in the Bundestag, the traffic light coalition broke apart on the same evening,” says Florian Reifferscheid, emergency doctor in Kiel and chairman of the Federal Association of the Working Groups of Emergency Physicians in Germany.

Among other things, there should be a nationwide standards in the course of the reform of how long it can take from the emergency call to the arrival car arrival. Because these times are very different from state to state; It is eight minutes in Berlin, 15 minutes in Lower Saxony and Brandenburg. For example, counts every minute with a cardiovascular arrest, says Reifferscheid. The longer it takes for professional help to be on site, the less the likelihood of avoiding serious neurological damage.

Valuable time can also be lost if an emergency occurs near a country or district border. If there is a rescue vehicle beyond the border, which is much closer to the scene of the accident than the next side of the border, this does not automatically mean that it is also ordered there. “Often the control centers responsible in a district or city or a federal state have different software systems,” says Reifferscheid. The exchange of information is therefore often carried out by phone, if at all.

In order to bridge long waiting times until professional first aiders arrive with a rescue or emergency vehicle, there are emergency call systems in some federal states, in which trained laypersons can register as first aiders via app. If an accident happens, the control centers determine the closest registered first aid and asks him if he can come to the scene of the accident. “It usually happens,” says the emergency doctor from Kiel.

But this system also has a catch, it only works in the respective federal state. “If you are registered as first aiders in Hamburg and go on vacation on the Baltic Sea, you will not be informed if someone has a cardiovascular arrest in the beach chair next door,” complains Reifferscheid.

He hopes that the new federal government will put the reform of emergency care back on the agenda. The Björn Steiger Foundation based in Baden-Württemberg no longer wants to wait any longer. In March of this year, she filed a lawsuit from the Federal Constitutional Court. It says: “In an emergency, citizens must have the same chances of survival, regardless of the state they live in, whether in the city or in the country.”