The tasks include data and literature research as well as classification, annotation and coding of documents. Working hours up to 37 hours per month.

At the University of Bremen, the following positions are available in the Collaborative Research Centre 1342's project "Global developments in health care systems":

Student Assistants with up to 37 hrs/month

Start date: As soon as possible. The position is temporary, but a longer-term employment is intended.

The project is a part of the DFG-funded Collaborative Research Centre 1342 "Global Dynamics of Social Policy" and is directed by Prof. Dr. Heinz Rothgang, Prof. Dr. Sebastian Haunss and Dr. Lorraine Frisina Doetter.

The aim of the project is to map the historical development of the inclusiveness and the scope of benefits of health care systems worldwide. In doing so, we develop an AI supported system to facilitate the classification and annotation of a large corpus of documents.

Tasks

• Database and literature research
• Supporting the systematic classification of documents
• Supporting the annotation / coding of documents
• Supporting on administrative tasks

 
Requirements

• Enrolled in a German University
• Excellent command of English
• Knowledge of French is particularly welcome
• Experience in literature research
• Independent, reliable and organised working style
• Interest in social policy, health policy and/or health inequality

Desirable:

• Experience with reference management software, especially Zotero
• Experience in annotation / coding of text documents
• Interest in natural language processing and application of artificial intelligence

Deadline for application: Rolling basis until positions are filled.

Please send applications with CV and short letter of motivation to Gabriela de Carvalho (email:decarvalho@uni-bremen.de).

Contact:
Dr. Gabriela de Carvalho
CRC 1342: Global Dynamics of Social Policy
Mary-Somerville-Straße 3
28359 Bremen
Phone: +49 421 218-57078
E-Mail: decarvalho@uni-bremen.de

Fischer has studied the development of social policy in the field of long-term care both in a comparative and conceptual perspective.

Johanna Fischer is working in project A04 "Global Developments in Health Systems and Long-Term Care as a New Social Risk" and has written her doctoral thesis entitled "The Emergence of Social Policy in the Field of Long-term Care. A Comparative Analysis of the Introduction and Types of Long-term Care Systems in a Global Perspective".

Her work is based on three papers:

• The Introduction of Long-Term Care Systems: The Nascent Diffusion of a Novel Social Policy Field (with Alexander Polte and Meika Sternkopf, forthcoming)
• Comparing long-term care systems: A multi-dimensional, actor-centred typology (with Lorraine Frisina Doetter and Heinz Rothgang, 2021, in Social Policy & Administration)
• The social long-term care insurance model: Comparing actor configurations across countries and time (under review)

Johanna Fischer's work includes the first comprehensive comparative study on the introduction of long-term care systems worldwide and the development of a multi-dimensional, actor-centred typology of long-term care systems. Based on this, she has presented a systematic international comparison of long-term care systems and especially of social insurance-based long-term care systems.

Contact:
Dr. Johanna Fischer
CRC 1342: Global Dynamics of Social Policy
Mary-Somerville-Straße 3
28359 Bremen
Phone: +49 421 218-57074
E-Mail: johanna.fischer@uni-bremen.de

Johanna Fischer and Gabriela de Carvalho explain in an interview how the country reports are produced and what added value they offer compared to other sources.

The twentieth issue of the CRC 1342 Social Policy Country Briefs was published a few days ago. On this occasion, could you briefly explain what this series is about?

Johanna Fischer: The series consists of short reports which each focus on a specific social policy field in an individual country. For instance, the latest two reports were published on the The Health Care System in Bulgaria (No 19) and the The Long-Term Care System in Sweden (No 20). In line with the CRC’s current focus on social policy emergence, the Country Briefs focus on the introduction of social protection policies and systems and their further development until today. The aim of the series is to give country and policy experts the opportunity to share their knowledge in a semi-structured format, to disseminate the information through the online open access publications, and to shed light on under-researched cases, in particular those found beyond high-income economies.

How did this series come about?

Gabriela de Carvalho: Within our project A04 on the Global Developments in Health Care Systems and Long-term Care as a New Social Risk (as well as the CRC as a whole), we are collecting a lot of data for instance on the introduction points of health and long-term care systems, their characteristics, and subsequent reforms. From this we have plenty of indicators which are stored in the CRC’s Global Welfare State Information System (WeSIS) and can be used by us and others for research. However, this information is contained into – mainly – categorical and numerical indicators. We have established the Country Brief Series to complement these datasets with more in-depth descriptions in a story-telling format and information that country experts or team members have accumulated. We thought that it would be a pity if this comprehensive knowledge about health and long-term care system beginnings and development would not be recorded and published. For the future it is planned that the Country Briefs will also be stored in WeSIS as an additional country-based resource.

What is the particular benefit of the series compared to existing social policy country profiles?

Johanna Fischer: There are several benefits of the CRC 1342 Social Policy Country Briefs which are not fully covered by other publication series. One is the explicit historical focus – in line with the CRC’s research agenda – on the initial introduction and further chronological development of social protection systems. Other publications do focus much more on providing a snapshot of the currently existing systems. However, we think it is important to contextualise current developments with a thorough understanding of their historical trajectories to understand why they look like as they do today and also for comparing countries at different stages of development.

Gabriela de Carvalho: We also emphasise the role of the state in health and long-term care systems, and the different ways in which this actor took responsibility for health and elder care. Even though we plan to publish briefs on all countries of the world, we particularly target under-researched cases from the Global South. Examples are the reports on the healthcare systems of Equatorial Guinea and Mozambique which are currently under review.

Gabriela, you have written the first issue of the series - what is the biggest challenge in such a report?

Gabriela de Carvalho: The biggest challenge in writing such a report is, I would say, the 'novelty' of the content. As here at the CRC we have an explicit interest in historical developments and the role of the state in social policies, our country briefs shed light on these topics, which is different from existing descriptions of social policies. Therefore, a historical analysis and reflection of each case is necessary before producing the report.

There are also conceptual challenges: For instance, experts have different ways to measure and operationalise what a system is, and when a system starts. This requires an open and constant dialogue between the editors of the series (the A04 project) and the authors.

Further, data availability differs greatly among countries. Authors often need to slightly adapt the provided template to accommodate for issues of data availability and reliability.

How do you choose the topics of the issues (policy field and country)?

Johanna Fischer: At the moment we are working on the both policy fields covered by our project, that is health and long-term care. As for the countries, we have started mostly with the ones where we had an established contact to potential authors for instance because they had participated in our expert surveys already. Furthermore, we tried to cover a diverse set of countries situated in different regions. Our aim is explicitly to cover cases outside the standard Northern/Western country samples often analysed, even though we are of course happy to also include reports on the more well-known cases. For long-term care, for instance, many reports have so far focused on the long-standing members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development or the European Union. We are therefore happy that we were already able to extend this sample, for instance with the Country Briefs on Uruguay, Costa Rica, Taiwan, Singapore, Ukraine, and Serbia.

Gabriela de Carvalho: In the case of healthcare, reports on countries such as Jamaica, Mozambique, Albania, and Mexico have already been published or are currently under review.

Will the series cover other policy fields in the future as well?

Johanna Fischer: We are open to extend the series to other policy fields. In the future we would therefore like to more closely collaborate with other CRC projects to make this happen.

Contact:
Dr. Gabriela de Carvalho
CRC 1342: Global Dynamics of Social Policy
Mary-Somerville-Straße 3
28359 Bremen
Phone: +49 421 218-57078
E-Mail: decarvalho@uni-bremen.de

Dr. Johanna Fischer
CRC 1342: Global Dynamics of Social Policy
Mary-Somerville-Straße 3
28359 Bremen
Phone: +49 421 218-57074
E-Mail: johanna.fischer@uni-bremen.de

De Carvalho studied the role of global actors in shaping health systems in the Global South, Henninger the interplay of immigration and social policy in authoritarian regimes.

Gabriela de Carvalho's thesis is titled "The role of global actors in shaping healthcare systems: Advancing analytical frameworks to better portray the empirical reality of Global South countries" and was graded "magna cum laude".

The primary aim of her dissertation is to analyse the role global actors play in shaping healthcare systems in Global South countries in order to advance typological work to better portray the empirical manifestations of healthcare systems worldwide, especially in middle and low income nations. My dissertation consists of three papers: The first study empirically examines whether and how IOs, more precisely the World Bank (WB), influence the (legal) foundations of healthcare systems in the nations of the Global South (Article A). The second investigation consists of a systematic literature review of the scholarship on healthcare system typologies to verify whether existing frameworks (a) take into account the increasing role global actors play in healthcare system arrangements, and (b) are able to portray the universe of healthcare systems worldwide, with a special focus on LMICs (Article B). Finally, a conceptual and analytical framework of healthcare systems to display and compare arrangements is proposed, taking into consideration the particularities of Global South systems (Article C).

Article A:
de Carvalho, G. (2021). The World Bank and healthcare reforms: A cross-national analysis of policy prescriptions in South America. Social Inclusion (in press).

Article B:
de Carvalho, G., Schmid, A., & Fischer, J. (2021). Classifications of healthcare systems: Do existing typologies reflect the particularities of the Global South? Global Social Policy, 21(2), 278–300. https://doi.org/10.1177/1468018120969315

Article C:
Frisina Doetter, L., Schmid, A., de Carvalho, G., & Rothgang, H. (2021). Comparing apples to oranges? Minimising typological biases to better classify healthcare systems globally. Health Policy OPEN, 2, 1–8. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.hpopen.2021.100035

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Jakob Henninger's doctoral thesis is entitled "The Politics of Immigration and Social Protection in Electoral-Authoritarian Regimes" and was graded "summa cum laude" (examination committee: Susanne K. Schmidt, Friederike Römer, Christian Joppke, Heiko Pleines, Patrick Sachweh, Johanna Kuhlmann).

Jakob Henninger's findings include:

• Concerns about immigration are more likely to lead to an increase in demand for social security in authoritarian regimes than in democracies.
• Questions in parliament are also a means for opposition MPs to criticise the government's immigration policy in electoral authoritarian regimes.
• In electoral authoritarian regimes, the goals and actions of civil society organisations advocating for immigrants' rights are significantly weaker than in democratic states.

A paper on which the thesis is based has already been published:
Choose your battles: How civil society organisations choose context-specific goals and activities to fight for immigrant welfare rights in Malaysia and Argentina, with Friederike Römer (2021) in Social Policy & Administration. Two further papers are existing as manuscripts.

Contact:
Dr. Gabriela de Carvalho
CRC 1342: Global Dynamics of Social Policy
Mary-Somerville-Straße 3
28359 Bremen
Phone: +49 421 218-57078
E-Mail: decarvalho@uni-bremen.de

Dr. Jakob Henninger
CRC 1342: Global Dynamics of Social Policy, Institute for Intercultural and International Studies
Mary-Somerville-Straße 7
28359 Bremen
Phone: +49 421 218-57077
E-Mail: jakob.henninger@uni-bremen.de

The co-director of project A04 was invited to the podcast run by the City College of New York to talk about health care systems in the Global North and South, global trends and challenges doing research on these topics.

Rights Talk is a City College of New York podcast that addresses current human rights challenges around the world. The podcast invites critical perspectives and questions the future of rights in the twenty-first century.

Lorraine Frisina Doetter, co-director of the CRC project A04 Global Developments in Health Care Systems and Long-term Care as a New Social Risk spoke on the podcast about health care around the world and challenges in comparative health care systems research.

Among other topics, Frisina Doetter touched on topics like health care as a human right, global trends challenging healthcare systems around the world, the inefficiencies of the Us healthcare system and its resistance to change.

Frisina Doetter also presented the work being done at CRC 1342 and the challenges of doing comparative healthcare systems research on a global level: (1) the availability of data, especially historic data on healthcare in the Global Sout, and (2) How to arrive at concepts that can be universally applicable and still meaningful. "Most scholars have a very specific understanding of a health care system with doctors and nurses trained in biological studies as the core", Frisina Doetter says. Other actors are being neglected as well as so called alternative medicine, which is a functional equivalent in many societies. "These and other functional equivalence should not be missed/neglected in our research. We need to develop concepts that capture that in our comparisons. In order to do this, we need to examine our normative and epistemic biases."

Listen to the episode of Rights Talk:
The Right to Health in Comparative Perspective: the WHO, North-South Systems, and Transnational Interdependencies with Dr. Lorraine Frisina Doetter

Contact:
Dr. Lorraine Frisina Doetter
CRC 1342: Global Dynamics of Social Policy
Mary-Somerville-Straße 3
28359 Bremen
Phone: +49 421 218-58561
E-Mail: frisina@uni-bremen.de

Gabriela de Carvalho explains in an interview why existing typologies of health care systems have a strong Global North bias and why this is problematic.

Gabriela de Carvalho, Achim Schmid and Johanna Fischer have examined the literature on health care system classifications. The existing typologies, the team has found, have a strong Global North bias and thus fail to capture important features of health care systems of the Global South. Gabriela de Carvalho, the first author of the paper published in Global Social Policy, explains some details of their findings and what this means for researchers and policy makers.

You have reviewed the literature for existing classifications of health care systems and found that they are poorly suited to support research on the Global South. What is the reason?

Gabriela de Carvalho: The main goal of our research was to evaluate the health care system typology literature and its ability to capture the particularities of health care systems of the Global South. The findings of our study points to limitations of several features of existing typologies: their coverage, methods used, and criteria they build on. Regarding coverage, health care systems of LMICs (low- and middle-income countries) are rarely taken into consideration in the literature, as classified cases consist of a 1:5 ratio of Global South to Global North countries. With respect to methods, the overreliance on inductive approaches to classification often excludes countries that cannot be measured in numeric terms. Health statistics mostly focus on the Global North, and has only recently included more data on countries from the South, hampering the analysis of arrangements beyond high-income nations. The use of inductive typologies to classify systems may result in poorly informed classifications especially if the study aims at the creation of a tool for applicability beyond their sample of cases. With regard to the criteria and characteristics health care systems are compared by, dominant features of health care systems that mostly exist in LMICs such as the segmentation of the system for different population groups, are not taken into consideration in many typologies. This often results in typologies that do not capture the empirical reality of the South.

In your paper you write that the health care systems in many countries of the Global South are very different from those of the Global North. What are the most important points?

Gabriela de Carvalho: All health care systems regardless of the country face numerous challenges and the current pandemic made this even more evident. Still, it is undeniable that systems of the Global South endure even greater financial and technical constraints. Besides larger disparities in health care per capita spending, number of health care professionals, and burden of diseases, LMICs are more prone to rely on international actors (transnational organisations, INGOs, and third countries) to finance, provide services and even regulate their systems. Another very important characteristic of many health care systems of the Global South is segmentation, the coexistence of different schemes targeting different population groups according to income, social status and/or type of employment. As a general rule, the poor are beneficiaries of public services due to their exclusion from formal employment, while the upper classes are covered by social and/or private insurance. This stratification leads to extensive health inequalities, as public services only provide basic care, and supplementary services are only used by those who are able to afford them.

What do you see as the reasons why these aspects have not been sufficiently considered in the classification literature so far?

Gabriela de Carvalho: In general, we believe that scientific research is still concentrated in and revolve around OECD countries due to data availability, financial and technical resources, institutional capacity, and the interest of researchers. Of course, recent decades have seen an expansion of (health care systems) scholarship on LMICs, mainly in the form of in-depth case studies, but it still lacks in comparison to the Global North literature, especially when systematic comparison is concerned. If more varied cases are not taken into account, the literature will continue to only partially represent the empirical reality, amplifying the ‘invisibility’ of less studies countries/regions. Particularly to the scholarship we are analysing, it is clear that classification and the development of meaningful typologies is much more complicated when dealing with countries of the Global South. Reasons for that vary from segmentation/parallel (public) systems, parts of the population and/or health services left to markets, and the existence of less „mature”systems. While systems found in the Global North can also be mixed or hybrids in some way, it is much harder to condense the information and assign an LMIC to an ideal type.

What are the consequences of the mismatch between the existing classifications in the literature and the health systems existing in the Global South - for scientific research and for practice/policy?

Gabriela de Carvalho: As the literature often relies on health care systems of the Global North to develop classificatory tools, it seems reasonable to assume that the models resulting from these typologies are more prominent and influential in shaping researchers and policymakers’ ideas of what a health care system does – and should – look like. We argue that high-income examples can be (mis)interpreted as portraying ‘best’ models or ‘benchmarks’, which may lead to standard setting for other countries, disregarding particular and fundamental characteristics of health care systems in LMICs. This could also translate into policy advice being modelled in terms of the well-known types. For scientific research, this bias towards the North may hinder novel knowledge production that could potentially focus on less analysed cases, as research tends to gravitate around seminal works, leaving aside unfamiliar cases or new theoretical considerations.

Read the full paper (Open Access): Classifications of health care systems: Do existing typologies reflect the particularities of the Global South?

More about the research of Gabriela de Carvalho, Achim Schmid and Johanna Fischer and the whole project A04 team:
Global Developments in Health Care Systems and Long-term Care as a New Social Risk

Contact:
Dr. Gabriela de Carvalho
CRC 1342: Global Dynamics of Social Policy
Mary-Somerville-Straße 3
28359 Bremen
Phone: +49 421 218-57078
E-Mail: decarvalho@uni-bremen.de

Dr. Johanna Fischer
CRC 1342: Global Dynamics of Social Policy
Mary-Somerville-Straße 3
28359 Bremen
Phone: +49 421 218-57074
E-Mail: johanna.fischer@uni-bremen.de

Dr. Achim Schmid
CRC 1342: Global Dynamics of Social Policy
Mary-Somerville-Straße 3
28359 Bremen
Phone: +49 421 218-58526
E-Mail: aschmid@uni-bremen.de

CRC member Heinz Rothgang welcomes the Federal Government's legislative proposal. However, the jobs could only be filled if the federal states changed their binding quotas for highly qualified staff.

The Federal Government has adopted a legislative proposal under which 20,000 additional positions for auxiliary staff in full-time inpatient care for the elderly in Germany are to be financed by the nursing care insurance scheme. This is not intended to increase the contribution of those in need of care.

Nur mit einer ausreichenden Personalausstattung ist eine gute Pflege möglich. Darum wollen wir bis zu 20.000 zusätzliche Stellen für Pflegehilfskräfte in der Altenpflege finanzieren. Heute wurde der entsprechende Gesetzentwurf im Kabinett beschlossen: https://t.co/UbNPF5zEmd pic.twitter.com/7RGapFE8xx

— BMG (@BMG_Bund) September 23, 2020

CRC member Heinz Rothgang, who together with colleagues has developed a procedure for the standardised assessment of personnel requirements in care institutions, evaluates the proposed legislation positively: "It is a first step - no more and no less. The proposal itself is good and sound for now," he said in an interview with buten un binnen. However, the new assessment procedure revealed that a total of 100,000 additional full-time jobs will be needed in long-term care nationwide, which corresponds to an increase in personnel of one third compared to today. "We need about three to four percent more skilled workers in Germany," said Rothgang, "but 70 percent more auxiliary staff.

The planned financing of the 20,000 auxiliary staff positions via the long-term care insurance scheme is a necessary precondition, but regulations at state level stand in the way of practical implementation. "In almost all federal states ... we demand a skilled labour share of 50 percent of the nursing staff. If a facility falls below this level, legal action and even closure is looming," Rothgang said in an interview. The federal states will therefore have to change these regulations, otherwise there is a risk that the positions will not be filled.

Rothgang does not expect the quality of nursing care to decline if the ratio of skilled staff falls: "If auxiliary staff is added without cutting jobs for skilled staff, this should not lead to disadvantages. If additional unskilled workers take the pressure off the skilled workers, this will result in an improved quality of care - with a decreasing ratio of skilled workers".

The final report of the project for the development and testing of the scientifically based procedure for the standardised assessment of personnel requirements in care facilities was approved and published on 23.09.2020.

Contact:
Prof. Dr. Heinz Rothgang
CRC 1342: Global Dynamics of Social Policy
Mary-Somerville-Straße 3
28359 Bremen
Phone: +49 421 218-58557
E-Mail: rothgang@uni-bremen.de

Project A04 "Global developments in health care systems and in long-term care as a new social risk" is offering internships lasting 2-4 months (20-39 hours/week).

Project A04 is part of the Collaborative Research Centre (CRC) 1342 "Global Dynamics of Social Policy" and focuses on tracing the development of social policy in the fields of health care and long-term care in countries worldwide. Our research aims at pinpointing introduction times and major reforms of health care and long-term care systems and identifying different types of systems as well as factors shaping their development. The project team consists of seven researchers and is directed by Prof. Heinz Rothgang, Dr. Lorraine Frisina Doetter and Prof. Sebastian Haunss. For more information on the project A04 and the CRC please see: https://www.socialpolicydynamics.de/projects/project-area-aglobal-dynamics/project-a04/en/

Tasks

The internship will mainly focus on in-depth research on the historical development of health care systems and/or longterm care systems in one or in several countries. You will search and review relevant academic literature, reports and legal documents and summarize the results. Ideally, this work will feed into writing 5-7 page country briefs which will be published in our CRC 1342 Social Policy Country Brief Series. Additional tasks might also include the collection of quantitative data and literature research and management on health and long-term care.

Requirements

• Interest in health and/or long-term care policies
• Very good knowledge of English and experience in writing English texts
• Experience with literature review and/or data research

Desirable

• Basic knowledge of social policy, health care policy and/or long-term care policy
• Knowledge of EndNote
• Additional language skills (French would be an asset)
• Knowledge of or interest in politics or policies in specific regions/countries in the Global South

Offer

We offer a cooperative working environment in a friendly, interdisciplinary, and multicultural team at one of the major research projects on comparative social policy study in Germany, where you get the opportunity to apply and develop your skills and knowledge. The internship provides you with insights in working in academia and the possibility to attend (online) meetings of the A04 project, and (digital) events of the CRC 1342 and SOCIUM. During your internship, you have the opportunity to author one or several Social Policy Country Briefs which will be published in our country brief series. If interested, writing your MA thesis related to the project is a possibility as well.

Conditions

Internships can be flexibly arranged in the period between September 2020 and March 2021 and should last approximately 2-4 month. Weekly working time should range between 20-39 hours. Please state your preferences for period, length, and weekly hours in your application. Concrete modalities will then be coordinated during the hiring
process.

Due to the restrictions caused by the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, work will usually have to be conducted from home and meetings and coordination will take place online.

Application

If you are interested in an internship at the project A04 please send your application to Prof. Dr. Sebastian Haunss (sebastian.haunss@uni-bremen.de). Your application should include a CV, a short letter of motivation as well as a current transcript of records as a PDF document. Please specify your preferred work modalities in the application as well. In case of questions on the internship please contact Sebastian Haunss.

Contact:
Prof. Dr. Sebastian Haunss
CRC 1342: Global Dynamics of Social Policy
Mary-Somerville-Straße 7
28359 Bremen
Phone: +49 421 218-58572
E-Mail: sebastian.haunss@uni-bremen.de

Homes and care services are highly affected by the pandemic. Nearly half of the services report that outpatient care is at risk.

A nine-member team from the Institute for Public Health and Nursing Research (IPP) and the SOCIUM Research Centre Inequality and Social Policy, led by Karin Wolf-Ostermann and CRC member Heinz Rothgang, conducted a nationwide online survey in outpatient and inpatient nursing facilities. Data are now available from 701 nursing services, 96 semi-inpatient and 824 residential institutions.

Nursing homes, as well as nursing services, are affected to a high degree by COVID-19 cases, both among employees and among those in need of care. Based on data from the Robert Koch Institute for May 5, 2020, more than 60 percent of deaths nationwide are attributable to residents of nursing homes (49 %) or clients of outpatient care services (12 %) - their share of all infected persons is only 8.5 percent. It is remarkable that 80 percent of all nursing homes had no confirmed COVID-19 cases. The cases are therefore concentrated in a few facilities, but these are then usually severely affected.

Almost every fifth nursing home and every tenth outpatient nursing service is affected by cases of employee illness. The proportion of sick people is six times higher among employees in nursing homes than in the normal population, and twice as high among employees in outpatient nursing services.

About half of all nursing services and more than two thirds of all nursing homes report staff absences of up to 10% due to the corona virus. In one sixth of the nursing homes, the absence of personnel is even more than 10%. Bottlenecks with regard to personal protective equipment for employees or surface disinfectants were originally very large. In the meantime, the situation has eased somewhat, although one in four nursing services and one in six nursing homes still complain about too little protective equipment.

Up to now, nursing homes have been the main focus of media coverage. However, just under half of all outpatient services report that the care of those who have been cared for up to now is at risk, unstable or even not guaranteed. "The fact that so little attention is being paid to home care is worrying in light of this," the report states.

From the perspective of the research team, the survey reveals the following: In order to be able to guarantee the reliability of care, the demands of care services and inpatient facilities must be met. This includes nationwide and practical recommendations for action, a permanent adequate supply of protective and disinfectant agents, systematic and regular testing of residents and staff, as well as better remuneration for nursing staff and improved staffing.

You can download the full report on the results of the survey of care facilities during the Corona pandemic here (German only)

Contact:
Prof. Dr. Heinz Rothgang
CRC 1342: Global Dynamics of Social Policy
Mary-Somerville-Straße 3
28359 Bremen
Phone: +49 421 218-58557
E-Mail: rothgang@uni-bremen.de

A research team at the University of Bremen wants to find out what challenges nursing facilities face during the corona pandemic and how they deal with it. The aim is to make proposals for policy makers to take appropriate action.

A nine-member team from the Institute for Public Health and Nursing Research (IPP) and the SOCIUM Research Centre Inequality and Social Policy, led by Karin Wolf-Ostermann and CRC member Heinz Rothgang, is conducting a nationwide online survey among outpatient and residential care institutions. More than half of all nursing facilities in Germany, a total of 18,000, are now contacted by e-mail.

People in need of care are among the most vulnerable groups in the country. If you fall ill with COVID-19, the death rate is very high. They should be protected. The only currently known and used strategy to contain the pandemic is social distancing. However, this strategy cannot be applied to those in need of care to the same extent as for the rest of the population, as those affected depend on personal support and therefore cannot do without physical proximity. Nevertheless, social distancing measures can be taken, for example by restricting the opportunities for visits. "However, this leads to isolation and loneliness, which is also dangerous for those in need of care. So we are in a dilemma," says nursing science professor Karin Wolf-Ostermann.

The aim of the scientific investigation is now to determine what challenges exist for nursing services during the corona pandemic. The aim is to determine what human and material resources are lacking and what changes in the general conditions could have a positive effect on the nursing facilities. Based on the results, the participating Bremen scientists want to develop recommendations for action which can be fed into the political process via the Federal Ministry of Health. "The corona crisis shows clearly how burdened nursing facilities are. Hopefully, efforts to improve the staffing situation in institutions will not be hindered by the crisis, but even promoted," says health economist Professor Heinz Rothgang. His colleague Karin Wolf-Ostermann adds: "The crisis is an opportunity for a technological innovation push. For example, facilities should enable residents to communicate digitally with relatives".

Heinz Rothgang explained further details about the current situation in nursing homes in two interviews at buten and binnen:

• So belastend ist die Isolation in Pflegeheimen
• Sieben Corona-Todesfälle in Bremer Pflegeheim

Contact:
Prof. Dr. Heinz Rothgang
CRC 1342: Global Dynamics of Social Policy
Mary-Somerville-Straße 3
28359 Bremen
Phone: +49 421 218-58557
E-Mail: rothgang@uni-bremen.de