CDU on health and care

The CDU wants hospitals, family doctors, and specialists to be available throughout Brandenburg, not just in cities and the suburbs around Berlin. Hospitals, practices, and pharmacies in rural areas should coordinate more closely, and prevention, health, and long-term care should be planned together.

There should be doctors and hospitals everywhere in Brandenburg. That includes the countryside. The CDU wants to do this with counties, towns, and health insurers. Hospitals, doctors, and pharmacies should work together better. Community nurses should care for old and sick people in rural areas.

Medical care centers (MVZ) are to be strengthened and expanded, and gaps or oversupply in care are to be balanced based on a needs assessment. Community nurses are to care for chronically ill and elderly patients in rural areas and take pressure off family doctors; training for family midwives and new academic nursing roles such as the Advanced Practice Nurse is to be supported. E-health and telemedicine are to be expanded, for example to cut duplicate examinations. The state is to introduce degree programs in pharmacy and dentistry. The program also plans funding regions for innovative and digital approaches and pilot projects for care close to home.

The CDU wants to preserve all hospital sites in Brandenburg and rejects changes to the hospital landscape being forced by federal law. In its view, hospital planning should remain a matter for the state.

No hospital in Brandenburg should close. The federal government should not force changes by law. The state should plan its own hospitals. All hospitals should get enough money.

Hospital planning and management are to stay with the state of Brandenburg. Joint planning with Berlin must take the needs of Brandenburg's hospitals into account. All sites are to receive adequate funding with long-term planning certainty, since in the CDU's view short-term bailout programs are not enough. Emergency response times are to be met and emergency care secured, with integrated emergency units playing a role.

Because many practices face closure if no successors are found, the CDU proposes a two-part strategy: train more doctors and use incentives to spread them more evenly across the state. Recognition of foreign degrees is to be sped up without lowering quality standards.

Many doctors will retire soon. Then nobody takes over. The CDU wants to train more doctors. Doctors should get money if they move to the countryside. Degrees from abroad should be accepted faster.

A municipal grant program is to help towns provide land for practices, co-fund large medical equipment, and offer other incentives. The rural doctor scholarship is to be expanded and opened to dentistry students; recipients commit to working in rural areas. The Cottbus university medicine innovation center (IUC) and the Brandenburg Medical School are to keep receiving support. Schools are to inform students early about health careers, and where independent practices are lacking, medical care centers are to step in. Work and family life in health care are to be made easier to combine.

The CDU wants good long-term care to remain affordable for everyone and calls for a fundamentally new federal approach to financing residents' out-of-pocket costs in nursing homes. The state's Pakt für Pflege (care pact) is to be continued and written into the state care law.

Care is getting more and more expensive. The CDU says everyone should be able to afford good care. The federal government should change the rules for nursing home costs. That means the part people pay themselves. Care at home should come first.

The care pact is to be continued, expanded, and anchored in the state care law. Prevention is to delay the need for care, and home care is to take priority over residential care. Schools are to inform students about care training, and training is to be better adapted to trainees' life situations to reduce dropouts. Nursing and therapy sciences at the BTU Cottbus-Senftenberg are to be strengthened, and digitalization is to cut paperwork. Temporary agency work in care is to be curbed, and family caregivers are to get more support.