AfD on health and care

The AfD wants to strengthen the midwifery profession and relieve freelance midwives of professional liability insurance costs. Home births and birthing centers should remain available in rural areas too. The party is skeptical of the EU-mandated shift to university training for the profession.

There are too few midwives. The AfD wants to help them. Midwives pay a lot for required insurance. The AfD wants to ease that cost. Home births should stay possible.

The platform names unresolved problems with liability insurance and the guarantee supplement for midwives who attend births as the main cause of the shortage. In the AfD's view, compensation payments do not solve the problem of rising premiums. On the gradual move to academic training required by an EU directive, the party voices doubts: it fears that committed women without access to university study will be shut out. It describes the previous vocational training as high-quality and recognized.

The AfD rejects a COVID vaccine mandate and restrictions on basic rights for the unvaccinated, above all for children. It considers the vaccines insufficiently tested and their risk impossible to assess. It wants to use all legal means to prevent mandatory vaccination of children.

The AfD is against making COVID shots mandatory. This applies most of all to children. It says the vaccines were tested too briefly. People without the shot should not face disadvantages.

The platform argues that developing a vaccine usually takes several years, while the COVID vaccines were created within months. The AfD points to the vaccines' novel methods and to reports of serious side effects and deaths in connection with vaccination. From this it concludes that the risk cannot be assessed. Parents, who bear the responsibility, should decide on vaccinating their children.

The AfD wants to double state funding for hospital construction from €120 million a year and create a state structural fund of €1 billion. This is meant to clear the investment backlog. It calls the sale of municipal hospitals to private chains a mistake.

Many hospitals need money for buildings and repairs. The AfD wants to double the state's money for this. A fund of one billion euros should be added. The AfD says health must not be a business.

The platform puts the investment backlog at Lower Saxony's hospitals at €2.2 billion. The structural fund is meant to speed up improvements in inpatient care. The AfD demands that patient welfare come before economic interests. It counts local regional hospitals as part of basic medical care; in its account, the flat-rate payments per case introduced in 2003 made many of them unprofitable and led to privatizations, closures and mergers.

The AfD supports local health centers as a complement to office-based doctors and wants to develop regional health networks further. This is meant to allow care to be steered locally, with citizen participation. The party is critical of hospital chains running such centers.

The AfD wants more local health centers. Doctors from many fields work together there. Doctors, hospitals and other helpers should coordinate better. Citizens should have a say.

According to the platform, health centers bring together many specialties and can offer young doctors modern working-time models; the AfD sees them as continuing the polyclinic model. It counts the centers as a public service and warns against viewing patients only in terms of profit. Cooperation among providers is to be promoted, especially for the chronically ill, and health professions better organized. The party names poor networking and too little focus on the patient as major cost drivers.

The AfD wants rural hospitals providing basic and standard care to be brought back under municipal ownership and kept there. It rejects any further expansion of hospital corporations.

The AfD wants to keep hospitals in the countryside. Towns and districts should own these hospitals again. Big hospital companies should not gain more influence.

The program is critical of public operators pulling out of inpatient care. Where sites are merged for economic reasons, citizens should be involved and care must not get worse. In municipally owned hospitals, supervisory boards should be staffed with qualified experts so that reforms do not fail because of party politicians.

The AfD wants to strengthen preventive health care and calls for free school meals that meet the standards of the German Nutrition Society. Children should be able to grow up healthy regardless of their parents' income.

The AfD wants people to stay healthy in the first place. Schools should offer free meals. The food should be healthy. Schools should teach children about healthy living.

Funding programs and school-based offers are meant to inform children and young adults about the risks of an unhealthy lifestyle. The state should make sure that all municipalities and districts can draw on and use the prevention funds of the health insurers. The AfD also calls for a sports funding program that involves sports clubs to prevent school sports lessons from being canceled.

The AfD wants to give home care greater financial recognition and create incentives for relatives who provide care. Residential care should focus mainly on people with severe or multiple impairments.

The AfD wants more money for people who care for relatives at home. Caring for family should also count more toward a pension. Care homes should mainly serve people who are very ill.

The program considers payments to family caregivers too low compared with the cost of a care home place. Care within the family should count more toward a later pension, and residents' own share of care home costs should be capped. Care homes should primarily take people who can no longer reasonably be looked after at home, with the money saved going to home care. Housing and urban planning should take the aging population into account, and multigenerational houses are supported.

The AfD wants to tackle the shortage of care workers with higher pay, binding staffing rules and less red tape. Lower Saxony should pay the highest care reimbursement rates in Germany.

There are not enough care workers. The AfD wants to pay them better. There should be fixed rules on how many care workers must be on duty. Care workers should have less paperwork.

Staffing needs should be derived from each patient's individual care needs, leading to minimum staffing levels for all medical areas. Salaries should be set in nationwide uniform pay scales, along with a minimum staffing ratio that applies across the states. The AfD calls for more training and continuing education and wants to end the generalist nursing training. Care workers should vote themselves on whether they want a professional body with voluntary membership.

The AfD wants ambulance services to meet the required response time everywhere, meaning the set time limit for reaching the scene. To that end, ambulance stations should be spread out more widely, air rescue expanded, and emergency practices at hospitals kept open around the clock.

Ambulances should reach people quickly. For this, there should be more ambulance stations in more places. Rescue helicopters should be used more. Emergency practices at hospitals should be open day and night.

Volunteer mobile first responders should be added to the emergency call system as a supplement, and the program wants to examine whether they may use emergency lights and sirens. It points to this idea having been put into practice in Saxony-Anhalt. So-called portal practices should be attached to the cooperating hospitals statewide and be reachable 24 hours a day. This is meant to relieve hospital outpatient departments.

The AfD wants to make Germany as independent as possible from the world market for medical goods and essential medicines. It justifies this with the experience of the COVID pandemic.

Germany should make important medicines itself. The country should depend less on other countries. There should be stockpiles of vital medicines. That way Germany is supplied in a crisis.

Domestic companies should be more closely involved in making medical goods, backed by a joint product strategy. Emergency stockpiles should be set up as a precaution for critical and life-saving drugs. In the program's view, only nation-states proved capable of acting in spring 2020. It also considers such an approach worthwhile for the economy as a whole.

The AfD wants to abolish the DRG system, under which hospitals bill a flat rate per case. In its view, the system has pushed local hospitals into financial trouble and puts the billing case ahead of the person.

Hospitals today get a fixed sum for each treatment. This is called the DRG system. The AfD wants to abolish it. It says the system hurts small local hospitals.

The program holds the legal rules on flat-rate payments partly responsible for once-profitable hospitals getting into difficulty. In the AfD's view, the system does not ensure care that matches need and performance. The reform is meant to make billing more patient-friendly.