Editorial

Excerpt

Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen would have thought twice about discovering the X-rays if he could have known that more than 120 years later doctors and nurses in German hospitals are investing a lot of energy and time on arguing over who is responsible for collecting the pictures from the X-ray unit and bringing them to the bedside. What a waste of energy! Thanks to recent developments in e-health, including the possibility to transmit X-ray pictures electronically, this political problem has been met by a technical solution. This comes timely because the energy is needed for the battles of the twenty-first century which will focus on resources for documentation, as we can learn from this issue of the Journal of Public Health. Vogel and co-workers compare the satisfaction of junior doctors in Germany and Switzerland. They find that junior doctors in Germany spend an average of 3 h/day on documentation. This forces them to work more hours than foreseen by the German Employment Act. The authors refer to the non-medical workload as one of the main reasons for junior doctors to quit the clinical career. Compared to their Swiss colleagues the survey revealed less overall job satisfaction among the German doctors. The reverse outcome would have been a true medical sensation, given the numerous anecdotic reports from professionals who crossed Swiss borders (it is almost exclusively a one-way street from Germany to Switzerland). However, the fact that Vogel and co-workers identify the insufficient communication of evidence-based medicine and of error reporting systems as the most significant problems might surprise even insiders. Assuming that these results will be confirmed in future investigations, the dilemma becomes obvious: more error reporting would put even more weight on the already overloaded scale pan of documentation. Evidence-based medicine has been discredited as “bureaucratic medicine” by opinion-leading doctors in Germany since its appearance. Can we expect that more documentation and “bureaucracy” will increase the level of satisfaction among junior doctors? …