The story of the German Health Minister Jens Spahn and Judith Heepe, the nursing director of the Charite Hospital in Berlin, is a bit like the story of the hare and the hedgehog. Like the cunning hedgehog, Heepe is always faster.
In September 2019, Spahn was in Mexico to sign a contract to speed up the process for Mexican nurses to get work permits in Germany. Heepe had already been there. A month earlier, Spahn had sent his secretary of state on a recruiting mission to the Philippines. Heepe had been there too.
In the fairy tale of the Brothers Grimm, the hare thinks to himself: that is not possible. Judith Heepe sees the funny side when she talks about her imaginary competition with Spahn. In the race to recruit nursing staff from abroad, you have to be very creative. And sometimes take matters into your own hands.
“The international nursing staff has brought warmth and openness,” says Judith Heepe
Heepe has been running the nursing department at Charite, the oldest hospital in Berlin and the most famous in Germany, for more than five years. She is responsible for 4,600 staff, and during the second wave of the pandemic, they work under pressure every day, especially the nurses in the intensive care unit of the COVID-19 unit.
Fight to recruit nurses in Germany
Had the pandemic broken out four years ago, Charite probably would have had to admit defeat. “At that time we were missing 400 nurses. Every year we have closed this gap with 100 workers and at the same time expanded our training capacity,” says Heepe.
That is why she not only flew to Mexico and the Philippines, but also traveled to Albania and approached South America. Charite also wants to bring Brazilian nurses to Germany soon. “The market in Germany has completely dried up,” she says. According to the German Interdisciplinary Association for Intensive and Emergency Medicine (DIVI), the country lacks about 3,500 to 4,000 skilled workers in intensive care.
Politicians constantly ask Heepe how the situation came to this. “I can only tell them, this situation is our own fault. In the past few years, there have simply not been enough people trained and qualified. We now have a totally avoidable gap in the next four or five years,” she says. It is an emergency that could prove costly to Germany in the coming weeks as intensive care stations are overcrowded as a result of the pandemic. “It also means that we have to pay people better,” says Heepe.
Struggles with officials and bureaucracy
Heepe is someone who gets things done. Her motto: don’t take no for an answer.
“At one point I knew the State Office of Health and Social Welfare better than I ever wanted to be,” she says with a laugh. She always had to talk about the office’s requirements for foreign nurses to provide original documents. Her relationship with the Berlin health authorities has a history: it happened almost three years ago, half a world away in Mexico. And Heepe still remembers every detail.
“I was in a video conference with 15 Mexicans who were desperate because their recruiting company had gone bankrupt,” she recalls. ‘And then I said to them,’ What does it matter? We can do it! We bring you here! ”
For Heepe, that meant the start of a nerve-racking side job. She took on everything the agencies would normally arrange, from visas and flights to dealing with government officials, bank accounts and health insurance, to organizing language courses. And sometimes when the whole project was in danger because of the German bureaucracy, she took unconventional measures.
‘I say to my German colleagues:’ You have everything here. You don’t have to emigrate, ” says Mexican nurse Herbert Perez
A suitcase full of documents
In April 2018, Herbert Perez boarded a plane from Mexico City to Berlin with a suitcase and a backpack. Charite had paid for the flight. The backpack contained two trousers, three T-shirts and two shirts. In the suitcase: all original paper documents for the 15 Mexican nurses who wanted to work in Germany. The young native nurse from the southern state of Oaxaca with the German given name became the vanguard; he had everything in his baggage that officials in Berlin demanded.
“The scale at the airport showed exactly 22.5 kilograms,” Perez recalls. “People were still coming to the airport at the very last minute to hand over documents.” The nurse can now laugh when he thinks back to his first trip to Germany, but at the time he was a nervous wreck.
“What would have happened if I had forgotten something in the midst of all the hustle and bustle, or if documents had been lost in transit or if the airlines made a mistake and the suitcase disappeared?” All these thoughts went through his mind. But everything worked out. Today, after a six-month program to certify his credentials, Perez is a valued colleague. He works in the coronavirus intensive care unit and helps day in and day out to help Germany through the crisis.
Dramatic situations in intensive care units
“The current situation is extremely critical, there are only a few intensive care beds,” Perez said. “We are currently reaching the limits of our capabilities.” He has already pushed his limits – like many nurses, he contracted the corona virus and was bedridden with a fever for a week.
Perez wanted to be a nurse since he was a small child. He’s the kind of person to be told when to slow down. Even now he is surprised when his colleagues tell him to relax, that he is entitled to vacation or days off. “I didn’t know anything like that from Mexico, as an employee you have fewer rights there.”
Heepe organizes everything so that Perez’s partner, a kindergarten teacher, can soon join him in Berlin and start working in Charite’s kindergarten.
So an international success story with only winners? Not quite. There is increasing criticism that Germany is picking up well-trained personnel from developing countries, while this is also urgently needed at home. A recent report in the German newspaper Frankfurter Rundschau spoke of “nursing imperialism.”
‘Germany must solve its nursing problem itself’
The German Interdisciplinary Association for Intensive and Emergency Medicine (DIVI) is aware of these allegations. The experts agree: The nursing shortage in Germany is a problem caused by the country itself, and in an emergency such as the current coronavirus pandemic, other countries should not be further weakened.
“Bringing in qualified staff from abroad always sounds like the big answer to the problem. But the more you investigate it, the less the answer seems,” said Michael Isfort, deputy board chairman of the German Institute for Applied Nursing Research. The share of foreign nursing staff in the hospital sector is currently about 1%. “That’s extremely small.”
Nurses like Herbert Perez mainly go to big cities like Berlin; According to Isfort, 90 to 95% of the international workforce works in the major urban centers. “We have still not been able to get healthcare providers from abroad to the countryside,” he says.
According to experts, it is clear that recruiting from abroad will not be the long-term solution to Germany’s nursing emergency.
This article has been translated from German.