Director General Bernhard Wurzer locates the problem at the hospitals for which the states are responsible. Their tomographs are far from being used to capacity. However, he criticized in an interview with the APA that patients were still being sent to the general practice area.
In radiology practices, 12,000 to 13,000 examinations per year are carried out on individual devices, says Wurzer. Hospital MRIs, however, only recorded 2,000 to 3,000 examinations in the same period. “It makes no economic sense to leave these devices unused in the afternoon and early evening hours and at the same time make additional contracts outside in the private practice area,” he emphasized.
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“What we are demanding, and we are feeling this massively at the moment, is that they stop constantly sending patients out for examinations, be it before operations or when patients come to hospitals,” Wurzer explained further in the direction of hospitals. In the ÖGK there has been more or less a zero increase in patients and frequencies in the inpatient area and a doubling in the office sector in recent years.
“We are one of the most photographed countries in Europe”
From the perspective of the ÖGK General Director, the solution would be contracts with hospitals to provide services for private practice as well. This is already working quite well in individual federal states, for example in Upper Austria. The insured people also have a right to this, after all, they already pay 42 to 50 percent of the equipment in the hospitals, which costs around 1.5 million euros each, through social insurance contributions.
Apart from that, Wurzer referred to the international comparison. The Netherlands, for example, with twice the population only had a third of the devices as Austria. “We are one of the most photographed countries in Europe,” he noted. However, this doesn’t help patients if they suffer from pain and have to wait months for an examination.
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