Chancellor Angela Merkel reassured Germany's 17,000 communal health office workers on Tuesday that a €4 billion ($4.7 billion) federal package agreed in June would be implemented over the next six years.

"The fact that we have come through the pandemic so well has also to do with our [federal state]-structure," said Merkel, making a comparison with centralized nations while praising Germany's local health officials for their "key role."

The pandemic had confronted them with "unfathomable extra work" in trying to trace and contain the coronavirus, she said during a joint video conference with communal, regional and federal representatives.

Leipzig Mayor Burkhard Jung, who heads the Association of German Cities, said health authorities "need the financial aid quickly."

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Extra funding promised in June

Across Germany, 375 public health offices run by local counties and larger cities are to get funds for 5,000 extra permanent jobs by 2022, including 1,500 by the end of next year.

The overhaul, drafted in June by federal Health Minister Jens Spahn and ministerial colleagues of Germany's 16 regional states, includes digitalized equipment upgrading, qualification upskilling and pledges of better pay to attract medics.

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Underpaid, overworked

The roughly 2,500 doctors working at communal offices — psychiatrists, pediatricians and dentists included — have long warned of being underpaid and under-resourced, compared to colleagues in Germany's other health entities.

The June package would initiate a collective salary deal to bring them into parity and remove disincentives to public health office career paths.

Welcoming the plan, doctors' association (Bundesärztekammer) chief Klaus Reinhardt, representing 506,000 medics, warned Tuesday that recruitment was just starting and the overhaul would need "careful and sustainable" implementation.

Ute Teichert, who chairs the trade union representing communal health office doctors' (DVÖGD), blamed low pay on a "yearslong blockade mentality" of communal authorities at the federal level, and said reform was overdue. 

"It is a first important step to compensate for years of neglect and skimping in this sector," said Teicher.

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Decentralized pandemic measures widely accepted

Reinhard Sager, the president of Germany's counties (Landkreistage) association, said Tuesday that local health office tracing of COVID-19 patients, testing and containment — despite deficiencies — was recognized among local populations.

"If there is one thing we have learned in the past six months, it is this: The pandemic can be well controlled in a decentralized manner," said Sager, adding that only a few "guide-rails" needed to be proscribed at the federal level.

A survey commissioned by the counties association found that 60% of respondents believed COVID-19 measures at the local level had proven the most appropriate.

ipj/dr (Reuters, dpa, AFP)