ILooking back, it becomes clear how badly Corona has raged among old people. Almost every second corona death in Germany comes from a nursing home, as the nursing report by the Barmer Krankenkasse shows, which is available to the Düsseldorf “Rheinische Post”. “In relation to the years 2020 and 2021, the cumulative proportion of home residents among those who died with Covid-19 is 45 percent,” write the authors.
At the same time, the report shows that North Rhine-Westphalia has done better than many other countries in the fight against Corona. In December 2021 – at the peak of the second wave – 2.87 percent of the residents of the home fell ill with Corona. That was more than in Bremen (0.57 percent) and Schleswig-Holstein (1.27 percent), but much less than in Thuringia (9.73 percent) and Saxony (10.3 percent). “Countries with a lower acceptance of the corona measures also had higher proportions of Covid in the population,” the authors write. Saxony and Thuringia have particularly low vaccination rates.
The Corona years left deep marks on nursing staff nationwide. According to the Barmer study, almost 70 percent say that they are often physically exhausted, compared to 43 percent before the pandemic. The number of nurses who can no longer sleep through the night has risen from 29 percent to 43 percent. Now many want to get out: 43 percent have thought about giving up their job. Before the pandemic, it was just under 20 percent.
“As a society, we cannot afford for the staffing situation in nursing homes to worsen because employees give up,” said Heiner Beckmann, head of Barmer in NRW, and called for more health management and nursing care reform from a single source.