Klaus Reinhardt, President of the German Medical Association, has proposed that retired doctors should regularly volunteer in schools to educate children about health literacy. Reinhardt suggested that a pensioner could, for instance, visit a primary school once a month to talk about the importance of knowing how to manage one’s health.
According to the doctor association president, early education could help people learn how to treat minor illnesses themselves. “People can sometimes help themselves with trivial ailments. This has decreased over the past few decades,” Reinhardt stated. As an example, he cited a healthy 25-year-old suffering from gastroenteritis, who “does not necessarily need a home visit at night, but should know how to help himself initially.” He added that many people lack basic knowledge, such as knowing how to use an inhaler correctly when coughing, noting that “such things could be taught much earlier.”
In implementing this idea, Reinhardt argued that it would not require creating new certified professional staff every time. “We should organize some of these things with a certain pragmatism,” the association president continued.
Enhancing overall health literacy could also help doctors utilize their time more effectively. Concurrently, he stressed that primary care must be better coordinated, and “the destruction of working hours through bureaucracy” must be tackled consistently.
Furthermore, given the high proportion of older doctors in the field, Reinhardt also called for incentives to facilitate longer professional careers. This extra work need not be full-time. He mentioned that in his practice, colleagues over 70 still worked about 20 hours per week and focused on their patients. “That gives them joy,” Reinhardt told the newspapers of the Funke Media Group.
