Grüne on health and care

The Greens want to guarantee enough midwives, obstetricians and pediatricians everywhere in Bavaria. Daycare centers, after-school care and schools would offer more exercise, psychosocial support and state-subsidized healthy meals. The party argues that a healthy lifestyle learned in childhood usually lasts into adulthood.

The Greens want children to grow up healthy. There should be enough midwives and children's doctors everywhere. Daycare and school should offer more sports. The state pays part of the cost for healthy food there.

More sports, exercise and psychosocial care would be brought into daycare, childminding, after-school care and schools. Meals there are to be healthy, regional and high quality, with the state sharing the cost. Poor children, children with rare diseases or disabilities and their parents would receive certified care and counseling. Educational staff would get training on developmental disorders and mental illness to remove the taboo around the subject.

The Greens want to anchor health promotion and prevention across all policy areas and make them accessible to everyone regardless of income or disability. Municipal public health offices would get more money, more staff and better digital tools. Municipalities would also receive help with heat action plans.

The Greens want to keep people from getting sick in the first place. Everyone should have access to preventive care. Public health offices should get more money and more staff. Towns should make plans for extreme heat. The state should advise and fund them.

The platform names good nutrition, clean air, exercise, health education and mental well-being among the pillars of prevention. Municipalities would be supported in offering healthy food in schools, daycare centers, hospitals and care homes, and in creating neighborhoods that encourage physical activity as well as places to rest. Drawing up heat action plans would be funded in a structured way, with advice from the state health and food safety office. The party justifies strengthening health offices by pointing to past cuts whose effects, it says, became visible during the pandemic.

The Greens want comprehensive, high-quality health care throughout Bavaria, especially in rural areas. Needs would be assessed across sectors, more licensed slots for specialists treating publicly insured patients would be created, and municipal health and care centers would be supported.

In rural areas, the doctor is often far away. The Greens want good care everywhere in Bavaria. There should be more places for specialist doctors who treat publicly insured patients. Towns should be able to set up their own health centers. Doctors, hospitals and care services should work together better.

The party wants a thorough assessment of the supply situation and of needs that spans outpatient and inpatient care. The Gesundheitsregionen Plus program (regional health networks) would be developed further, and successful projects made permanent without duplicate structures. Municipalities would get support when they set up public-interest health and care centers staffed by several professions or hand them over to nonprofit associations. The platform's guiding idea is networked care in which doctors' offices, health offices, care services and hospitals cooperate.

The Greens want everyone in Bavaria to be able to get to a suitable hospital within half an hour in an emergency or when labor begins. They oppose further hospital privatizations. Telemedicine is meant to cut long trips and waiting times.

The Greens want hospitals close to people. In an emergency, the trip should take 30 minutes at most. The same goes for giving birth. Hospitals should no longer be sold to private companies. Doctors should also be able to advise by video.

According to the platform, emergency rooms, obstetrics and pediatrics are part of basic care in every region. Hospitals needed for care are to be moved into public ownership where possible. The state would provide money for IT investment and promote telemedicine in hospitals; the electronic patient record is meant to ease communication among doctors, therapists, hospitals and patients while respecting data protection. Asylum seekers would receive a health insurance card as soon as their procedure starts. Heat and climate protection would become mandatory when hospitals are built or remodeled and would be subsidized for care facilities.

The Greens want to merge the dispatch centers of the on-call medical service and the emergency number across Bavaria so that callers get to the right place faster. Emergency medical services are to be organized by a single provider structure, become more digital and be expanded where needed. The platform says this secures quality and eases the load on crews.

The Greens want to improve emergency medical services. The numbers 112 and 116117 should work closely together. That way people get the right help faster. Crews should work more with computers. Students should practice first aid every year.

A standardized emergency call protocol is meant to steer patients to the right level of care. Handling requests by phone and telemedicine would be written into the state emergency services law, and paramedics would be allowed to use the full powers provided under federal law in Bavaria. Plans include digital documentation on duty, a statewide record of care capacity, digital transfer of patient data and a uniform first-responder app. To prevent overload, community paramedics and social-psychiatric and emergency nursing teams would be introduced. Yearly resuscitation drills in schools and mandatory defibrillators in large and public buildings are also planned.

The Greens want to give nurses, midwives, therapists and medical assistants more tasks and responsibility in patient care. Training and university places are to be matched to actual need and increased. The platform points to weaknesses exposed by the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Greens want to strengthen health care jobs. Nurses, midwives and therapists should be allowed to decide more on their own. There should be more places for training and study. People training as therapists should get paid for it.

Municipally run family practices in rural areas would get more practice and care assistants so that country doctors can use their time better. Capacity for medical school places, nursing training, especially pediatric nursing, and specialized medical training would be reviewed and raised. Trainees in therapy professions would receive pay modeled on nursing training. In addition, all academic degrees are to become available in these professions.

The Greens want to expand home care as well as day, night and short-term care, which is also meant to relieve family caregivers. Nursing is to become more attractive through more staff, better pay and broader powers. The Vereinigung der Pflegenden in Bayern (Bavarian nurses' association) would be turned into a nursing chamber.

The Greens want more care services. For example, care at home or care for a short time. This also helps family members who give care. Nurses should earn more money. There should be more nurses. Nurses should get their own chamber. A chamber speaks for a profession.

Besides these forms of care, the platform names neighborhood centers as an additional service. Cities and towns would be able to shape their care infrastructure themselves and give priority to non-profit and municipal providers in order to keep services affordable. Qualified nurses would take over some medical tasks, which the platform says improves care in nursing homes and reduces hospital admissions. Plans include better staffing ratios, more training places and more academic nursing education where needed. The nursing chamber would define task and competence profiles and give nurses more political influence.

The Greens want people in a mental health crisis to get help quickly and close to home. To that end, more therapy slots would be created and competence centers set up as a first point of contact. The platform calls waiting for months unacceptable.

The Greens want better help for people with mental illness. Nobody should wait months for therapy. So there should be more therapy slots. New centers should show where a slot is free. Refugee children should get special help if they need it.

The plan is statewide coverage with outpatient and inpatient therapy as well as counseling, for example on suicide prevention and addiction. More therapists would be licensed to bill public health insurers, and trainee psychotherapists would be paid adequately. Peer support by people with their own experience of illness (ExIn) would be established throughout community psychiatric care. Competence centers would give a quick overview of available services. Also planned are awareness programs against stigma, more money for psychosocial working groups and regional coordination networks, and a checkup before school enrollment for refugee children with war trauma.

The Greens want to improve midwifery care with a funding program of 6 million euros a year and with midwife-led delivery rooms. Medicine should also take more account of differences between the sexes, including through a university chair for gender medicine. The platform argues that illnesses are otherwise detected later.

The Greens want to give midwives more financial support. Midwives help with births. There should be delivery rooms led by midwives. Women should be able to choose where they give birth. Medicine should pay more attention to women and men. Illnesses often show up differently in them.

The midwife program would pay for grants to set up practices and birth centers, housing during studies and scholarships. A supplement is meant to bring more freelance midwives for postnatal care to underserved regions, and a per-birth supplement is planned for home births. Midwife-led delivery rooms would complement physician-led ones and be funded following the example of other German states. Also planned are a Bavarian women's health report and attention to gender in state health funding. As examples, the platform cites heart attacks in women and depression in men being recognized late.

The Greens want women to be able to have an abortion close to where they live and plan a statewide care concept for this. Young people and recipients of social benefits would get contraceptives free of charge. State funding for fertility treatment would be open to all couples.

The Greens want women to be able to end a pregnancy near their home. There should be a plan for all of Bavaria. Young people should get birth control for free. So should people who receive social benefits. All couples should get help with fertility treatment.

The care concept is meant to guarantee free choice of method and be backed by training for doctors; the subject would become a fixed part of medical education and continuing training. Medication abortions with telemedical support would be made possible. The party wants to support federal initiatives for reproductive self-determination and implement them quickly, and says it will not tolerate actions directed against women or facilities. Hygiene products would be free in public buildings such as schools and universities. Fertility funding would treat same-sex, different-sex and diverse couples equally, and transcultural medicine and psychotherapy would be offered statewide.

The Greens want a drug policy built on youth protection, education, prevention and care. Municipalities would be allowed to set up supervised drug consumption rooms, and drug checking would be introduced in Bavaria. The amount of cannabis for personal use that goes unpunished would rise to 15 grams.

The Greens want more education and help on drugs. Cities should be allowed to set up rooms for safer drug use. People should be able to have their drugs tested for dangerous substances. People with a little cannabis for themselves should not be punished. The limit should be 15 grams.

According to the platform, the goal is to reduce the number of people with addictions and the harm caused by drug use. Awareness campaigns on legal and illegal substances for all ages and more social work in schools are meant to help. Drug checking is justified by the particular harm done by contaminated substances. Therapy and substitution treatment would be expanded. Decriminalization of cannabis users would be advanced in Bavaria until a federal cannabis control law is passed. Further campaigns would address newer forms of addiction such as online addiction.

The Greens want to establish care support centers with advice services in every county to relieve people caring for relatives. They also want enough places in residential and home care in all municipalities.

Many people care for their relatives themselves. Often these are women. The Greens want to help them. Every county should have an advice center for care. There should also be enough care places everywhere.

The platform points out that many people in Bavaria, especially women, care for relatives themselves. To relieve them, care support centers offering advice are to be created in all counties. The Greens also pledge to make sure every Bavarian municipality has enough places in nursing homes and with home care services.

The Greens want to create more counseling centers for mental health and push for more therapeutic professionals. Every school is to have social and youth workers so that overload is spotted early.

The Greens want more help for mental health. There should be more counseling centers. There should also be more therapists and doctors for this. Social workers should work at every school. They should notice early when a child is overwhelmed.

The plan includes additional counseling centers for children, teenagers and adults. Accessible and inclusive campaigns are to inform people about mental health and overload. The Greens advocate for more professionals in psychotherapy, psychosomatic medicine and psychiatry. Social and youth workers at all schools are meant to ensure that overwhelmed children, teenagers and parents are noticed early and get help.