The Federal Ministry of Health is currently working on a fundamental reform of the health care system. The focus is primarily on hospitals and their financing.

But other ideas are also being discussed. One proposal is that there should be hospitals that are run entirely by nurses. Even if this would go very far, the German Federal Minister of Health, Karl Lauterbach, would definitely like to give nursing staff more responsibility. “I would like us to have nursing staff here in the future who also work more like doctors,” he says in an interview with the weekly magazine “Zeit”. Nursing in hospitals urgently needs to be upgraded, he said. Lauterbach referred to other countries where “particularly well-trained nurses do many things that are reserved for general practitioners here”.
We will have to see what will be implemented in the end and how much more importance and responsibility the nursing staff will then have.