Children’s sick leave: Pediatricians call for abolition in mild cases – health

It’s this call from daycare that working parents regularly dread: The child has a fever and needs to be picked up. For father or mother this means: you have to leave everything behind at work. They are allowed to do that too, in 2024 the law will allow up to 15 child sick days per parent, during which either the employer or the statutory health insurance company must cover continued payment of wages.

However, the prerequisite is that a doctor has given the child a sick note. Parents are therefore forced to take the child to the doctor’s office or, like adults, to obtain a certificate by telephone since December 2023. Pediatricians and adolescent doctors are now calling for sick leave for children with minor illnesses to be completely abolished. “Parents can manage harmless illnesses themselves,” says the president of ChildrenMedical association BVKJ, Michael Hubmann, in an interview with Doctors newspaper.

If Pediatricians If even harmless illnesses have to be certified, this results in an “unnecessary use of pediatric resources,” says Hubmann. In addition, doctors’ practices are extremely unsuitable as “prosecution authorities for employers’ associations”. They would not be able to judge whether a parent would have to stay at home or whether another family member could take care of the child. “Absurdly, that’s exactly what the law requires us to do.” The employer is only obliged to release its employees with a certificate from a pediatrician.

Lauterbach has announced relief

The practices also created unnecessary work with certificates that were harmless Diseases certify so that children can go back to daycare or school, says Hubmann. He gives the following example: “A child has a mosquito bite. The daycare says: The child has a rash. So I get the dad from his editorial meeting. He picks up his son and comes to my practice.” Such a scenario is “no joke, it’s everyday life and a social harm.”

In some cases, Federal Health Minister Karl Lauterbach (SPD) is trying to reduce the bureaucratic burden in doctors’ practices. In October the minister made it easier to care for the sick Children announced at home. The Picture on Sunday He said at the time that parents should no longer have to run to the doctor on the first day that their child is sick for a certificate in order to claim child sickness benefit. “This is senseless bureaucracy and puts a strain on mothers and fathers. We can trust the parents.”

In a key issues paper last year, the minister presented recommendations for reducing bureaucracy in the healthcare system. Telephone sick leave, for example, is also part of this. With minor illnesses, patients no longer have to drag themselves into practices to get a sick note for their job. The condition is that you are known to the practice and do not have any severe symptoms. You can then receive a certificate of incapacity for work for up to five days. You have to go to the practice for a follow-up certificate.