Free medical care is increasingly in demand

More and more people need the medical free care

02/12/2013

More and more needy in Hesse gratefully accept the offer of free medical care. There is still a great demand, as the three contact points of Malteser Migrant Medicine reported in a dpa survey. In Frankfurt, Darmstadt and Fulda, people can take advantage of a free consultation with treatment. This offer is aimed primarily at migrants without a residence permit and people without health insurance.

Refugees who come to Germany from need have only a limited right to medical care. For people who live without us, access to medical services is even more difficult. You have to get along completely without medical help. Luckily, there are dedicated people who treat them for free.

Since 2001, around 12,000 Malteser migrants have received medical treatment for around 80,000 people. „The facilities are well received, we see increasing demand, especially in cities like Berlin“, Kaminski explained.

The influx grows from year to year
Also in Frankfurt, the number of those who urgently need a free treatment, increased enormously. While there were 300 cases in 2012, this year 400 people have already been treated.

„It is alarming that the crowd is getting bigger. We have to see how we can finance it“, tells the Frankfurt spokeswoman Lioba Abel-Meiser. The costs amount to about 30,000 euros per year. It has also been observed for some time now that the elderly and the chronically ill are increasingly being found in contact points.

Project manager Karin Uffelmann at the Herz-Jesu hospital reports that there had been no office hours for about a year when there was nothing for the employees to do. In the first year, 70 patients were treated, 15 of them dental. Every two weeks there is the possibility to visit the free consultation. Meanwhile, the offer has been expanded due to the steadily growing inflow to the Fulda Hospital and the hospitals in Hünfeld and Bad Hersfeld.

Costs amounted to 60,000 euros in the first year
If the doctors at the contact points can not help, the patients will be referred to other clinics. „We already had three cesarean sections, a bile operation, and even a traumatic brain injury that needed to be treated. If the man had not come to us after his fall from a ladder, he would probably have died“, Uffelmann reported.

But the treatments are complex and the costs of the OPs amounted to about 60,000 euros in the first year of the Malteser migrants medicine. So far, the clinics are bearing the costs and there are probably no problems with financing. Those responsible assume that the number of patients will rise in the future. „And although Fulda is a prosperous city without huge social hot spots“, so Uffelmann.

For the first time in 2006, the offer of Malteser Migrant Medicine was established in Hesse. „We continue to have high numbers of patients, about 700 people a year“, said the medical director, Wolfgang Kauder. More and more people from Eastern European countries, such as Bulgarians and Romanians, are registered in the drop-in centers. But more and more Germans, who were privately insured in the past and now can not afford the costs, take the treatment. This trend could even increase in the course of health care reforms in the future. (Fr)

Image: Dieter Schütz