The medical association Divi speaks of a "catastrophic situation" in children's intensive care units. Federal Health Minister Karl Lauterbach is calling for rapid relief measures. "The children need our full attention now," said the SPD politician on Thursday in Berlin.

News of overcrowded pediatricians’ practices and hospital wards is "very worrying," the minister said. "We are confronted with a situation where there are fewer than 100 intensive care beds for children in Germany." Many regular wards are already at full capacity, he said. "We are foreseeably not yet at the end of this wave, which is essentially caused by the RS virus." However, he said the situation is "under control.”

Several measures are intended to help ease the situation. One in particular is that some nursing staff are to be transferred from adult to pediatric wards. Lauterbach appealed to parents and pediatricians to postpone preventive medical checkups that are not immediately necessary by a few weeks. The ministry said parents should be able to obtain sick notes with a phone call to the doctor. Parents would have the option of staying at home when their child is ill and still remain entitled to sick pay.

Infections are expected to increase even more in the coming weeks. "Children are dying because we can no longer take care of them," said Michael Sasse, senior physician in charge of pediatric intensive care at Hannover Medical School. The situation is already critical, he said. But the enormous wave of infections with respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) has made the situation worse, he said. "Now three grades of school children are going to go through these infections because they're running around without masks," he said, referring to Covid measures which have ended.

Six to seven-hour waits are currently not uncommon in some emergency rooms, said Jörg Dötsch, president of the German Society for Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine.

The German Interdisciplinary Association for Intensive Care and Emergency Medicine (Divi) backed up its dramatic findings with a survey of the 130 children's hospitals participating in the cloverleaf approach for patient transfers. In each case, certain states collaborate. 110 had responded to a Nov. 24 inquiry, Divi Secretary General Florian Hoffmann said. Theoretically, there would have been 607 pediatric intensive care beds in Germany on that day. In fact, however, there were about 40 percent fewer, mainly because of staff shortages, he said. "The 607 beds became 367.”

Because all beds were full, in one instance, a child from the Hannover Medical School (MHH) was transferred to Magdeburg on Friday night, a distance of around 150 kilometers. "My work colleagues called 21 hospitals," reported Gesine Hansen, Medical Director of the MHH Clinic for Pediatric Pneumology, Allergology and Neonatology. The child, who was about one year old, had an RSV infection, which can be life-threatening, especially for the smallest and children with pre-existing conditions.

But no children who are in very poor health are transferred, Hansen emphasizes. In that case, a child who is doing better would have to be transferred in his or her place.

Divi Secretary General Hoffmann said the situation in intensive care units is not due to the RSV wave alone. Rather, the problem has grown over the years. Among other things, intensive care physicians are calling for better working conditions, the establishment of tele-medical networks and specialized pediatric intensive care transport systems.

The spokesman for the professional association of pediatricians and adolescents, Jakob Maske, said, "The fact that children's lives are in danger at the moment is the responsibility of politicians." In the past, he said, other profitability criteria were applied to pediatrics. "Now medicine has to be profitable, not cure diseases, but make money.”

The German government already wants to take countermeasures. This Friday, the Bundestag is to approve two financial injections. According to the coalition's legislative plans, there will be 300 million euros more for children's hospitals in 2023 and 2024, and an additional 120 million euros each to secure obstetrics locations. This is also intended to make funding less dependent on the current performance-based logic.

Lauterbach appealed to adults, "If you feel cold symptoms, please wear a mask, especially if you are in contact with children under two years old." The virus is often transmitted from adults to children, he said. "We have no evidence that the illness is more severe," he said. However, there are simply more children who get sick and also more who get sick for the first time at an early age.

According to the Robert Koch Institute (RKI), an estimated 5.6 severe cases of RSV respiratory disease occur worldwide per 1,000 children in the first year of life. Within the first year of life, 50 to 70 percent would typically have experienced at least one infection with RSV, and by the end of the second year of life, nearly all children would have experienced at least one infection. However, during the time with Covid protective measures in place, many such infections had temporarily disappeared.

Orig. text: dpa - Translation: ck