The health Minister wants to control the access to psychotherapy. Therapist fear of the Sick is a “discrimination against the mentally”.
the draft law aims to achieve Spahn, Insured quicker doctor’s appointments to get photo: Reuters
BERLIN taz | Barbara Lubisch, Federal Chairman of the German psychotherapists Association (DPtV), is outraged. “The proposed new feature can only be used as a rationing of psychotherapy, and discrimination of mentally ill people.” This innovation will be discussed on Friday in the Bundestag in first reading: as part of the new “date of service – and supply law”.
the aim of the new law is that patients can get quicker appointments with the doctor. Controversial of the passage is to decide that in the future, the “Federal joint Committee” provisions for a “phased and controlled” care for the psycho-therapeutic treatment. This also applies to requirements on the qualifications of contracted physicians and psychotherapists. The psychotherapist to be feared by this clause for the establishment of a sort of preceding instance, in which patients would be required to report in spe for the first time and then about the nature and assignment of therapists to decide. The associations reject this as “interference in the free therapists choice”. Their protest petition in the Bundestag took place within four weeks of almost 130,000 Supporters.
so Far, be waiting times for psychological therapies, which is often several months. For Lubisch any control leads not to more therapy jobs or shorter wait times. A planning is necessary. For this, there is a need, but rather, “a more targeted and differentiated increase in the number of psychotherapists seats”.
Some health insurance companies of rügen, that the therapist to select the patients. The Federal Minister of health, Jens Spahn (CDU) said at the hearing in the Bundestag on the act in September, patient, “in which there is something more pleasant to do therapy,” received “more of a date than those which are not quite so fond of sitting in the waiting room”. The DPtV refers to Numbers, according to which the spectrum of patients is not different in the case of therapists, and nervous doctors significantly. Moderate depression accounted for in the case of the psychotherapist, approximately 17% of the patients, the psychiatrists and nerve physicians around 9 per cent of the patients. People with a diagnosis of schizophrenia can be found in the psychotherapist, to a little under one percent among the patients with nerve doctors and psychiatrists to 3.5 percent.
Since April of last year to a psychotherapist to offer inside a week, two hours as an ordering consultation. The waiting time for a first contact with the psychotherapist is an average of 5.7 weeks. However, this does not mean that the Psychotherapist could then offer space for long-term therapy, emphasizes Lubisch. “Often, no Therapy is simple.”
