What do the parties in Hamburg say on health and care?

The AfD calls for a transparent review of the COVID period, arguing that medical decisions were not made professionally. It rejects restrictions on freedom and compulsory vaccination.

The AfD wants a close look at the COVID years. It thinks wrong decisions were made back then. It is against strict rules that limit people. It is also against forced vaccination.

Until federal long-term care funding is reformed, the AfD wants Hamburg's state budget to provide financial relief to people needing care. At the same time, the city's care inspectorate should get more staff and inspect nursing homes much more intensively.

Care costs a lot of money. Many people who need care become poor. The AfD wants Hamburg to help them with money. Nursing homes should also be checked more often. The city should hire more inspectors for this.

Doctors from outside the EU should no longer be licensed based on documents alone. Instead, the AfD wants a written and oral or practical exam at the level of the German state medical exam to protect patients.

Some doctors come from countries outside the EU. Often they only show their certificates. The AfD wants more. These doctors should take a test. The test should be as hard as for German doctors.

The AfD wants to reduce hospital-acquired infections through a quality program modeled on the Netherlands. Hospitals should publish annual hygiene reports and get support if infection rates are high.

Some patients catch germs in hospitals. The AfD wants fewer such cases. Hospitals should publish a hygiene report every year. Hospitals with many infections should get help.

To address the shortage of midwives, the AfD wants to make the profession more financially attractive. Following the Bavarian model, midwives should get a start-up bonus for setting up practice and a bonus for attending at least four births a year.

Hamburg has too few midwives. The AfD wants to make the job better. Midwives should get money when they open their own practice. There should also be a bonus. Pregnant women should get better information.

The AfD views medical care and health protection as national responsibilities without interference from the WHO or the EU. Care should be organized locally, available everywhere and for all citizens, according to proven quality standards.

The AfD says health is Germany's own business. The WHO and the EU should not decide. The WHO is the World Health Organization. Doctors should be close by everywhere.

The AfD wants to split the combined nursing training back into elderly care, pediatric and general nursing, and add assistant levels. Family caregivers should get more support, especially financial, and doctors should be relieved of paperwork by assistants.

Today there is one shared training for all care jobs. The AfD wants three separate trainings again. There should also be short trainings for helpers. Families caring for relatives should get more money. Doctors should get helpers for office work.

The CDU wants to improve staffing at the professional and volunteer fire departments and aid organizations and relieve ambulance services of non-emergency calls. It argues that the chance of getting timely help in Hamburg depends on where a person lives or happens to be.

The CDU wants to strengthen the fire department and ambulance services. The fire department should find new staff more easily. Ambulances should only come for real emergencies. For lighter cases, specially trained paramedics should come to the home.

The CDU wants to secure outpatient care through existing practices and rejects parallel structures such as Gesundheitskioske (walk-in health advice centers). The city government is to act as a partner to doctors, hospitals and insurers, cut red tape and provide sufficient hospital investment funding.

The CDU wants to strengthen family doctors and specialists. It does not want new walk-in health advice centers. Every district should have enough family doctors and children's doctors. Doctors and nurses should have less paperwork. Hospitals should get enough money for investments.

The CDU wants to create more university and training places in the health professions because demand is rising with demographic change. In addition, skilled workers are to be recruited abroad and their qualifications recognized faster.

Hamburg needs more doctors, nurses and therapists. So the CDU wants to create more places for study and training. It also wants to bring skilled workers from other countries. Hamburg should recognize their qualifications faster.

The CDU wants to change the fixed skilled-staff quotas in long-term care and make greater use of new job profiles under the supervision of qualified nurses. Family caregivers are to be supported through more counseling, training and short-term care places.

Long-term care lacks skilled workers. The CDU wants to change the fixed rules on the share of skilled staff. Helpers with shorter training should do more of the work. Family members should get more advice and courses. There should be more places for short-term care.

The CDU wants to revive the "Pakt für Prävention" (prevention pact) and work with many partners to improve the public's health knowledge. The focus is on young people, people at particular health risk, and people unfamiliar with the health system.

The CDU wants to prevent illness. To do that, it wants to revive an old alliance. It is called the prevention pact. Many groups should take part, such as schools, daycare centers and health insurers.

The CDU wants to undo cannabis legalization at the federal level and, until then, crack down in Hamburg on the supply of drugs to minors. Addiction services are meant to keep people alive but above all open ways out of dependency; the platform also addresses gambling and online addiction.

The CDU thinks legalizing cannabis was wrong. It wants to change that at the national level. Children and teenagers should grow up without drugs. Addicted people should get help to quit. The CDU also wants to fight illegal gambling harder.

The CDU wants to record the lessons of the COVID-19 pandemic in a continuously updated crisis management plan for all of Hamburg. This is meant to prepare the health and care system for disasters, crises and war.

The CDU wants to learn from the COVID years. Hamburg should get a plan for crises. The plan should always be up to date. The city should store protective equipment. This way doctors and nurses can still help in a crisis.

The CDU wants data protection rules to be applied more pragmatically for health research and wants Hamburg connected to the European Health Data Space. The city is to lead Germany in digitalization, telemedicine and artificial intelligence in health care.

The CDU wants to help health research. Data protection rules should be applied more loosely. Hamburg should be a leader in digital medicine. This includes treatment by video.

The CDU wants to ensure enough treatment and care services for people with mental illness, above all places in outpatient social psychiatry. It also considers secure residential places in Hamburg necessary.

People with mental illness should get enough help. The CDU wants more places for support in daily life. It also wants secure places in Hamburg. Then those affected do not have to live far away.

The Greens want to keep implementing and evaluating the heat action plan completed in 2024. More public drinking fountains and temporary cooling centers in public buildings are to be added. The platform justifies this with the health risk heat poses to especially vulnerable groups.

Extreme heat is dangerous for people's health. Hamburg has a plan to protect people from heat. The Greens want to keep carrying out this plan. There should be more drinking fountains. During extreme heat, cool rooms should be open to everyone.

The Greens want to add a health examination to the mandatory assessment of young children at elementary schools. It would cover development, vision and hearing. The aim is above all to reach children who have no pediatrician.

Young children come to the elementary school for a check. The Greens want to look at their health too. Experts check development, eyes and ears. This helps children who have no children's doctor.

Given the growing number of students with mental illness, the Greens want to set up care close to schools. The school health professionals project would be expanded with city funding. The program treats health as a key precondition for successful learning.

More and more students have mental health problems. The Greens want help close to schools. There should be more health staff in schools. The city should pay for this. Teachers should get more training on it.

The Greens want to introduce binding municipal planning of long-term care needs that is organized by neighborhood. Everyone who needs care should find services that match their needs.

The Greens want to plan care better. The city should know what help is missing in each neighborhood. Family and neighbors should be able to help with care. Family caregivers should get more advice.

The Greens want general practitioners, pediatricians and low-threshold contact points to be within reach in every part of the city. Access to basic care should not depend on where people live or how mobile they are.

The Greens want doctors' offices in every part of the city. The way to a family doctor or children's doctor should be short. There should also be health centers and advice nearby. The public health office should be strengthened.

The Greens want to use legislation to ensure that all children take part in preventive checkups. Mothers and families are to be better cared for through outreach services and more midwives.

The Greens want all children to go to their health checkups. Families get invitations in several languages. Mothers and families should get more help. For that, there should be more midwives.

The Greens want to expand interpreting services in doctors' offices and hospitals and get them established as a statutory benefit at the federal level. In addition, practices are to become barrier-free, and people without health insurance and homeless people are to get better care.

The Greens want everyone to be able to talk with their doctor. For that, there should be more interpreters in practices and hospitals. Practices should be reachable without obstacles. People without health insurance should get help. There should be a regular practice for homeless people.

The Greens want to create a site for research and treatment of post-viral illnesses such as ME/CFS at the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf. In addition, a competence center for fetal alcohol spectrum disorders (FASD) is to be set up.

The Greens want to help people with long-term effects after infections. The university hospital should do research and treat them. There should also be a center for FASD. FASD is a disability caused by alcohol during pregnancy.

As part of hospital reform, the Greens want to work with hospitals on further specialization and transparent quality. Outpatient and inpatient care are to be more closely linked, above all through integrated emergency centers across Hamburg.

The Greens want to keep improving hospitals. Hospitals should specialize in certain tasks. They should get enough money. There should be emergency centers across the city. Doctors' offices and hospitals work together there.

The Greens want to tighten Hamburg's law on protection from secondhand smoke. Exceptions for smoking in restaurants and bars are to be dropped, and outdoor seating areas and transit stops are also to become smoke-free.

The Greens want less smoking in public places. Smoking should no longer be allowed in restaurants and bars at all. That also applies outside restaurants and bars. Smoking should also be banned at transit stops.

The Greens want to expand health promotion in all stages of life and prevent violence and harassment at work. Medical care for prisoners during and after their sentence is also to be improved.

The Greens want people to stay healthy. There should be healthy food in daycare centers, schools and care homes. There should be no violence or harassment at work. Prisoners should get good care after release too.

The Greens want to strengthen outpatient and outreach support for people with mental illness and expand the psychiatric emergency service. The aim is to prevent repeated hospital stays and homelessness. Trauma treatment for refugees is also to grow.

The Greens want more help for people with mental illness. The psychiatric emergency service should get bigger. Offices should handle requests for help faster. Refugees with trauma should also get more treatment.

The Greens want to reduce dropout rates in nursing training by funding school social workers at nursing schools. Nursing professionals are to take on more tasks in local primary care. Intercultural and non-discriminatory care is to be made mandatory.

Many people quit nursing training. So the Greens want to fund social workers at nursing schools. Nurses should get more tasks in neighborhoods. Nobody should be treated unfairly in care.

The Greens want drug and addiction policy to rely on prevention, harm reduction, and decriminalization rather than prosecuting people with addictions. Addiction services are to be funded permanently, and drug education in schools is to become mandatory. The cannabis law is to be implemented in Hamburg.

The Greens do not want to punish people with addictions. They want to help and advise them. Schools should teach children early about drugs. Addiction services should get enough money. The cannabis law should apply in Hamburg.

The Greens want to offer drug checking in Hamburg, meaning the testing of drugs for their contents, to reduce the risks of use. Easily accessible support services and the supply of substitution treatment are to be secured.

In drug checking, experts test what is in a drug. The Greens want to make this possible in Hamburg. This should protect people from dangerous substances. Easy-to-reach help should stay. People with addictions should be able to get substitute drugs from a doctor.

The Greens want to improve protection against gambling addiction. In the next revision of the interstate gambling treaty, advertising for gambling and sports betting is to be banned and a monthly stake limit set without exceptions.

Gambling can be addictive. The Greens want to ban ads for gambling and sports betting. Each person should be able to bet at most 1,000 euros a month. The strict rules for gambling halls should stay.

The Greens want to greatly expand care for queer people, for instance with dedicated specialist offices and trained staff in hospitals and nursing homes. The platform estimates that 4,500 to 9,000 queer people in Hamburg need care and sees a lack of discrimination-free services, which it says leads to isolation.

Many queer people in Hamburg need care. Often there are no fitting services for them. So the Greens want to create many more services. Care workers should be trained for this. Older queer people should also have a say in important bodies.

The Greens want to make the emergency medical service medically independent and give it its own physicians. It is to be linked more closely with doctors' offices, hospitals and other services because call volumes are rising. Renovation of volunteer fire stations is to continue.

The ambulance service has more and more calls. The Greens want to give it its own doctors. It should work more closely with hospitals and doctors' offices. Volunteer fire stations will keep being renovated.

The Greens want to deploy an app that alerts medically trained people nearby when an emergency call comes in. This is to be combined with resuscitation training and more publicly accessible defibrillators. The reasoning is that every second counts in cardiac arrest and ambulances need several minutes to arrive.

When a heart stops, help must come very fast. The Greens want an app for first responders. The app calls trained people who are nearby. There will also be more courses on how to revive someone. More places will have defibrillators. These are devices that restart the heart.

The Greens want to create a short-stay psychiatric unit in the prison system and expand forensic psychiatric facilities as needed. According to the platform, the background is a rise in mental illness among inmates. Suicide prevention in custody is to be developed further.

More and more prisoners have mental illnesses. The Greens want a special unit in prison for them. Forensic clinics should also get more places. These are clinics for offenders with mental illness. The Greens want to prevent suicides in prison.

The Left wants city-run health centers in poorer districts that combine medical care with social and psychological counseling. Everyone in Hamburg should have nearby access to general practitioners and pediatricians regardless of their insurance. The party aims to overcome what it sees as two-tier medicine.

The Left wants health centers run by the city. They should be in poorer parts of town. They offer family doctors, children's doctors and counseling. Everyone should find a doctor nearby. The type of health insurance should not matter.

The Left wants to bring preventive health care closer to neighborhoods, including through community health nurses. Vaccinations should be easy to get and free of charge. Binding minimum standards would apply to indoor air in places such as daycare centers, schools and medical facilities.

The Left wants more preventive care in neighborhoods. Nurses should go out to people. Vaccinations should be free and easy to get. The air in daycare centers, schools and clinics should be clean. There should be fixed rules for that.

The Left wants to bring hospitals back into public ownership and abolish the flat-rate payment system based on diagnosis-related groups (DRG). Hospital planning would follow actual need. The party argues that health is not a commodity.

Many hospitals in Hamburg belong to private companies. The Left wants the hospitals to belong to the city again. Today hospitals get fixed amounts per treatment. The party wants to end that. There should be more money for births and sick children.

The Left wants to plan care capacity, improve working conditions in care and give family caregivers financial security. In obstetrics, there would be one-to-one care during birth and midwife centers. Needing care or caring for relatives should not lead to poverty or isolation.

The Left wants better planning for care. People who care for relatives at home should have enough money. There should be more short-term care. During birth, one midwife should be there for one woman only. There should be midwife centers.

The Left wants to expand the psychiatric crisis service and fully fund the training of psychotherapists. In drug policy, it favors an acceptance-based approach with drug checking, consumption rooms and places where use is tolerated. Therapy should be available without co-payments to everyone who needs it.

The Left wants more help in mental health crises. There should be more therapy, especially for children and young people. People who use drugs should get help instead of pressure. They should be able to have their drugs tested. This is called drug checking.

The Left wants Hamburg's COVID policy to be reviewed by a commission of inquiry (Enquete-Kommission). A broad range of experts would take part.

The Left wants Hamburg's COVID policy to be reviewed. A commission should do this. A commission is a group that looks closely at a topic. Many experts should take part, such as doctors and psychologists.

The Left wants medicine to stop treating men as the standard and wants conditions that mainly affect women to be better researched and treated. Menstrual products are to be available free of charge in public restrooms.

Medical research often looks only at men. The Left wants to change that. Illnesses that affect women should be studied more. Public restrooms should offer free pads and tampons. Trans people should get medical help more easily.

The Left wants free, accessible Wi-Fi in all senior housing and nursing facilities. Care homes should also be inspected regularly and supported in offering queer-sensitive and culturally sensitive care.

The Left wants free Wi-Fi in all care homes. The city should check the homes regularly. Homes should respond to the needs of queer people and people from other cultures. They should get support for that.

The SPD wants to introduce a state care allowance for people in need of care who have only pocket money at their free disposal. At the federal level it advocates solidarity-based funding of care and less bureaucracy.

Some people who need care have only a small amount of pocket money. The SPD wants the state to give them extra money. They can use it for things like personal hygiene and medicine. For the SPD, care should not be a business.

The SPD wants to ease the burden on people who care for relatives and create more short-term care places. The platform argues that relatives carry most of the load in long-term care.

Many people care for their parents at home. The SPD wants to help these people. There should be more places for short-term care. People in need of care stay there for a short time. Advice about care should also be easier to understand.

The SPD wants to upgrade nursing and health professions through better training and working conditions in order to keep and attract skilled staff. Foreign qualifications are to be recognized more simply and quickly.

The SPD wants more people to work in care jobs. Training should be good and free of school fees. Working conditions should get better. People who trained abroad should be able to work in Hamburg sooner.

At the federal level, the SPD supports introducing a Bürgerversicherung, a single health insurance covering everyone. Long-term care insurance is also to be financed on a solidarity basis so people can stay at home for a long time.

The SPD supports a Bürgerversicherung. That is one health insurance for all people together. Care insurance should also be paid for by everyone together. People should be able to live at home as long as possible.

The SPD wants the planning and funding of medical care to reflect how many people are actually treated in Hamburg, including those from surrounding areas. High demand from outside is not to disadvantage Hamburg patients.

Many people from nearby areas see doctors in Hamburg. The SPD wants planning to count them too. Not only the number of residents should count. People in Hamburg should not be worse off because of this.

The SPD wants to keep investing heavily in Hamburg's hospitals and to specialize and concentrate services more. Emergency care is to be reorganized along the model of integrated emergency centers so that people seeking help are treated faster.

The SPD wants to modernize Hamburg's hospitals. The city will use its own money and federal money for this. Hospitals should specialize in certain treatments. Emergency care should also be organized better.

The SPD wants to improve care around pregnancy and birth by setting up midwife centers in areas where they are needed. This builds on the recommendations of the expert commission "Gesunde Geburt" (Healthy Birth).

The SPD wants better care for pregnant women and young families. There should be midwife centers for this. They will open where midwives are missing. Children's hospitals should get enough money.

The SPD wants to expand local health centers and social counseling in family doctors' offices so that each district has at least one such center. This is meant to relieve patients and practices in the neighborhoods.

The SPD wants more health centers in the neighborhoods. Every district should have at least one. People get help and advice there. Health insurers should pay part of the cost.

The SPD wants health promotion to start early and reach all age and population groups. Plans include a heat action plan and a campaign for HPV vaccination.

The SPD wants people to stay healthy in the first place. So there should be more prevention. A plan will protect people on very hot days. The city will also promote a vaccine against HPV. HPV are viruses that can cause cancer.

The SPD wants to improve care for people with mental illness and set up community psychiatry networks in all districts. A psychiatry coordination office and a crisis hotline are also planned.

The SPD wants to give better help to people with mental illness. In every district, support services should work together. There will be a crisis hotline. People should get therapy sooner.

The SPD wants to reduce the use of legal and illegal drugs through prevention and enforcement and to fight drug dealing. At the same time, help for people with addiction such as consumption rooms and drug checking is to remain and grow.

The SPD wants fewer people to use drugs. The police should go after drug dealers. But people with addiction should get help. There are rooms where they can use drugs under clean conditions. People can also have drugs tested there.

The SPD wants to handle the new cannabis laws strictly in Hamburg, with high fines, tight licensing, and inspections of cultivation associations. It places special weight on protecting children and young people.

Cannabis has recently become partly legal. The SPD wants to apply the new rules strictly in Hamburg. People who break them should pay high fines. Growing clubs will be checked. Children and teenagers should get special protection.