Excellent doctors: how you as a patient keep an overview

“Christine Stroh has to come immediately”. It is necessary to the woman at 5.11 a.m. in the early morning. A freshly operated one is bad, her blood pressure falls threatening. Chief doctor Stroh is called by her team, maybe operating immediately. And Stroh, the professor, is already on the way, 15 minutes of rush to help and save.

Our colleague Kristin Kasten from the everyday life of medicine reports from Gera in Thuringia, where Christine Stroh practices in her specialty. It is obesity surgery, the field of gastric bypasses, ligaments and lacherys, including. From a medical point of view, even in times of the weight loss hype, this work is still urgently needed. It is the ultima ratio, the last remedy that preserves very overweight people from the most serious complications and ensures their participation in life. And as with everything that does medicine, use and risk equalize each other here, there is surgical risks, bleeding, especially, and this emergency could be one. How he went out and what Christine Stroh and her colleagues do every day,

The story is part of the current one star-Sleeping booklet “Good doctors for me”, which has been at the kiosk since February 15. In addition to reports from different areas of medicine, it contains the star-Medical lists with more than 4,000 recommendations from 100 specialist areas. With the star-Extra we open the fourth year of cooperation with the experienced quality experts from the Minq Institute. And we are very grateful for how benevolently our work was taken up by both readers as well as in clinics and practices – we were able to decide several times to print out expenses because the first edition was quickly out of print. However, the project is also so fulfilling because we see happy medicine again and again, healing and relief and again and again difficult to meet fellow human beings, which afterwards can take care of their health again and can live their lives.

This applies to all generations. In Germany, at least 35,000 children and adolescents live with type 1 diabetes, their body cannot form the sugar-regulating hormone insulin. It was only for a century that this diagnosis no longer feels a death sentence. At that time, the development of insulin therapy began in Canada, initially with animal hormone. Today, the youngest already dominate dealing with the insulin pen, the measurement of your own blood sugar level, or you use an automatic insulin pump. This gives them security and the time to be a young person and to participate in everything that belongs.

Constanze Löffler, Reporter and herself a doctor, visited the Hamburg Wilhelmstift: a Catholic Children’s Hospital in the east of the metropolis, she shows how much quality of life, independence and thus freedom can give high -quality medical care, how far it can be used through a bare business target measurable “health production “Extends. But also where the notorious weaknesses of our medical company are: Up to a good third of their patients, the Hamburg team Constanze Löffler reported, the transition to adult care does not succeed. The usual good care, the reliability is gone. The reason: change of responsibility. Finding correspondingly high -quality supply outside the pediatric structures is often difficult.

And unfortunately this is a fairly typical situation, technocratic known as a “interface problem”. One of the most common concerns in the healthcare system is that sick people do not find what they are looking for. The most prominent example of this, again in the news every year: the misguided rush in Germany’s emergency rooms.

As reporters who can take an insight into the clinical reality in many places, we can say: Yes, it is true that it is not a lobbyist-routine complaint if it says that a lot of people are in the rescue centers that are of acute Emergency are quite far away; Strangely enough, some of them, which have been labeling something around for days, which every family practice would get under control within minutes, including the associated soothing worries. Nevertheless, such troubles appear regularly on Saturdays in an emergency room because they have time that NerVerei should come to an end and to build a permanently good bond with a practice. The victims are people in acute need, but above all the more than buried staff in the clinics.

Since you read this article that the current one star-Sleeping book “Good doctors for me”, one can count that their personal health literacy, their medical interest and their active self -care are significantly above average. Nevertheless, we are all in a boat. After all, everyone knows about the obvious dilemma that has been emerging for years: Germany ages, and this naturally affects not only patients, but also the medical and nursing staff. A wave of retirement is also approaching there. It is therefore not just an attempt to get attention in the election campaign when Klaus Reinhardt, the President of the Federal Medical Association, has recently pointed out several times to urgently needed efforts that we have to face in order to live together across generations and in the As usual, to be able to leave our health system and its many places (still?) Excellent level.

This applies in particular to its diversity, the wealth of medical possibilities and specializations that Germany has built up as a leading industrial nation. Supply and demand may still be inadequate, but there is still confidence in terms of confidence in terms of the presence of the most modern therapies and also their mediation to the medical offspring. The core problems are predominantly structural, less professional in nature.

But what is structurally in the argument and makes health policy so controversial and difficult? There is again Reinhardt pointed out that in Germany, the country with the highest health expenditure in the EU, no clear connection between expensive and good. Part of medicine is disfigured by inefficiency and bureaucratic complicated production. Anyone who has recently received a decision on increasing the additional contributions in statutory health insurance will be able to understand this.

But the President of the Medical Medicals also takes us on all of us if he adds that the very high number of doctor-patient contacts in Germany does not make the country healthier per se. He emphasizes that the individual health literacy of the Germans over the past 20 years (and Reinhardt has been scientific evidence in the field) in spite of all the flood of information did not improve, but has not improved on average. This may also explain part of the complaint about the availability of doctor’s appointments. Let us take his reminder as a new call to make yourself smarter of good sources, which makes body, soul and spirit stable, which is warning signs of something serious and what is no need to worry.

Where’s the positive? Among other things, it is in our star-Special. Because have a recommendation character: they show you, us and also the doctors, the nurses and political responsibilities in a targeted manner, where it is going well, where professionalism and dedication bloom, where progress breaks down and wins humanity. , how much great effort, patience and therapeutic efforts can be worthwhile – and that they can also be found “in the system”. There is, for example, the 28-year-old patient, who is still a bullet-safe vest outside on the clinic site after weeks of treatment on the wage of the leading schizophrenia specialist, Professor Alkomiet Hasan-his fear of persecution is not yet gone. It is granted it, adjust the treatment, it stays for seven months until the paranoia fades, then he can go back to life. It passes important exams and starts an apprenticeship. We were allowed to experience that such stories, and quite a few, have been able to experience this year too.

How can it be that, especially in the area of ​​the care of mental illnesses, gaps gap such large gaps that the waiting times long, the therapy places are competitive? This is probably the thickest board that has to drill health policy: it is the fact that there was always and exists in our system at the same time. A crucial part of this lack of balance is politically homemade – the system of flat rates, for example, that almost all actors have seen today, led to the fact that lucrative things were offered far too often and uneconomical that appeared by clinics was specifically avoided. The hospital reform, which was successfully adopted as one of the ongoing projects of the traffic light coalition, could help.

For the time being, what you have long since taken to heart: if you live healthy, you know as much as possible and, if you need you, let yourself be guided by medical quality criteria when choosing your specialists. Yes, it is important to obtain high -quality hospital food (and that is increasingly attracted), it is important that visitors have short distances, but nothing is as important as the success of the operation according to current standards, good aftercare and the quality of the treatment results in total. The doctors stand for this prioritization, with their conviction and with their good name. This is a good compass.