Ensuring medical care despite a shortage of doctors

In the municipality of Stockheim, district of Rhön-Grabfeld, the first care room of the VERAH am Ort project opens in the presence of Bavarian Health Minister Klaus Holetschek.

Supply assistant on site, VaO for short, is a project of the project office Medizincampus Oberfranken of the University of Bayreuth, which takes up the challenge of improving medical care in underserved regions. The necessity of the project results from the double demographic change. It can be observed that in future an increasing number of older people will be dependent on regular GP care. At the same time, however, the number of GPs providing care continues to decrease. This trend can also be seen in the Streutal region in the Rhön-Grabfeld district.

The VaO project is an innovative further development of the established concept of the supply assistant (care assistant in the GP practice). Within the framework of the VaO project, sufficiently mobile patients no longer receive their medical care only in the form of home visits, but also in centrally located VaO rooms if they are sufficiently mobile. Here, the supply assistant provides the same service that she would provide in the context of a home visit. In this way, it is possible to save on the distances travelled by the medical officers and to use the time thus saved for the medical care of the patients, for example. Within the framework of the VaO project, it is to be evaluated to what extent GP care in underserved regions can be relieved in this way, how it affects the quality of life of the patients and how satisfied they, the doctors and the PAHs are with it.

With the conclusion of the concept development phase, the feasibility and implementation in practice is now being tested. For this purpose, the University of Bayreuth is relying on the cooperation of physicians, VERAHs and the mayors of the Streutal region. The final steps of the preparation began at the beginning of May with the training of the participating supply assistant. On Monday 22 May, all project partners finally met in Stockheim in the district of Rhön-Grabfeld for the ceremonial opening and commissioning of the first VaO room. The Bavarian Minister of Health, Klaus Holetschek, also attended the event as a special guest and presented a cheque for funding amounting to around 485,000 euros. The VaO project received an initial grant of 50,000 euros from the Bavarian State Ministry of Health and Care in 2022. The funding is used, among other things, for scientific monitoring and evaluation as well as to compensate the doctors and PAHs for their expenses, as the services are not yet financed by the health insurance funds.