Integrated Working Group "Health Professions"

The IAG regards itself as a platform of informal exchange for all (non-physician) health professionals. The explicit intention is not to limit the scope to key medical professions, since the range of health-related professions is already wide, and openness for future interprofessional correlations is to be encouraged.

We intend to look at care provision from a client-centered perspective and on this basis to reconsider what is required from health professionals.

We regard interprofessional collaboration as a tool to provide holistic care in health and illness and intend to explore and advance this collaboration. We want to learn together and from each other, and to identify the chances and limits involved in the delegation and substitution of doctors’ services.

The aim of adequate care provision with a long-term perspective into the future (demographic change, ageing society) is to allocate scare resources (shortage of skilled labour) in such a way that all citizens enjoy an optimum of health services. Underprovison, misprovision and overprovision are to be avoided.

In addition, we perceive a need for new and innovative approaches which assign increasing importance to paramedical professions. An interprofessional cross-linking and innovative concepts of care provision should always involve the consideration and step-by-step implementation of telemedical interventions (for example, electronic patient file, video consultation, DiGAs etc.).

We intend to encourage the communication between all health professions and with medical staff as well and thus facilitate the transition to new forms of care. Interprofessional formats of further and advanced training are to be initiated and evaluated. In this context, it may become necessary to devise new professions of greater and more diverse specification at various levels of training (such as therapy assistance for specific therapeutic products).  

Ecological aspects of health constitute another field of interest. We intend to study the impact of climate change on health, or the concept of the climate-neutral doctor’s office, and to identify the resulting additional tasks for the health system and those among them which might be covered by health professionals.

Priorities

• Development, implementation and evaluation of pilot projects

• Design of holistic and integrative approaches to care provision

• Projects on the subject of Moral Injury

For more detailed information (in German) see here.