WWhen Nadja Holz and Christian Scharf talk about their work, they really get excited: about how much responsibility they have as intensive care workers, how varied their job is, how large the spectrum of patients is. Heart attacks, strokes, accident victims – they deal with such cases every day in the intensive care unit of the Hochtaunus Clinics in Bad Homburg. Both started the training together in 1997 and have been there for 25 years. “I still enjoy my job just as much as I did when I started,” says Scharf.
A sentence that you don’t hear too often from nurses these days. Many intensive care and nursing staff in particular are simply exhausted after more than two years of the corona pandemic. Some of them have resigned or reduced their working hours, as surveys by the German Hospital Society show. And the difficult working conditions in care, the lack of staff and the permanent overload are also the focus of the public debate. Like Nadja Holz and Christian Scharf, many nursing staff in Germany generally enjoy their work. The only problem is that they often cannot exercise them as they see fit because of the lack of staff.
