The Robert Bosch Hospital in Stuttgart offers special nursing training for refugees. But the project flops: almost all of them fail the final exam.
Stuttgart – There is a shortage of nursing staff in Germany – at least 35,000 positions are unfilled according to an analysis by the Competence Centre for Securing Skilled Workers. Baden-Württemberg is not spared from this nationwide problem. The shortage was already known before the Corona pandemic put undue strain on the health system. Currently, the strain is forcing those responsible to take desperate measures. Even retired professionals were asked to help out during the pandemic in the southwest of Germany.
The Robert Bosch Hospital already had an initiative in 2017 to address the nursing shortage. The clinic in Stuttgart launched a model project: a special training course for nurses. The class was to consist of both Germans and refugees. In the summer of 2021, the final exams of the first class took place. But as the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) reports, only four of a total of 19 women and men mastered them. The reason seems trivial, but it reveals a terrible mistake in planning.
In principle, it can always happen that trainees fail a final examination. However, a failure rate of almost 80 per cent indicates failure elsewhere. As the FAZ writes, there were also participants who dropped out of the training before the final exam. The training framework for nurses looks great: refugees from Syria, Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan, among others, are to be given a professional future. In addition to the practice and theory of nursing, the participants received training in intercultural competence. This is also one of the reasons why the training lasted one year longer than usual and required more staff.
This was made possible by the Robert Bosch Foundation, which sponsors the hospital. It contributed an additional 1.3 million euros to the regular training costs, which are paid for by hospitals with money from taxpayers and insured persons. The failure of the model project in Stuttgart was therefore not due to financial bottlenecks or a fundamentally bad concept. Rather, a misjudgement of the required language skills was responsible for the high failure rate in the final examination.
This is because refugees who were selected for training as nurses at the Robert Bosch Hospital only needed to pass an A2 language test. The highest level of this classification is C2, and there are six levels in total. A2 means only basic knowledge of the German language. The participants of the model project thus started at a language level that was already rather insufficient without previous knowledge in the field of care.
The Robert Bosch Hospital was obviously not completely unaware of this, because further German language courses were offered as part of the training in order to raise the language level to a higher level. The problem: Participation was voluntary and the course did not include compulsory intermediate exams. “At the time, after so many refugees had come to Germany, we wanted to send a political signal,” Professor Mark Dominik Alscher, Managing Director of the Robert Bosch Hospital, told the newspaper FAZ. “It was well-intentioned, but it didn’t work out well.”
In the meantime, the Robert Bosch Hospital has evaluated the course and concluded that the principle of personal responsibility was set too high. At a cost of 1.3 million euros, this is quite an expensive insight for the Robert Bosch Foundation. It is the majority owner of the Bosch Group and finances itself via its dividends. Because the automotive supplier has recently been struggling with the shift to e-mobility, the Foundation’s funding volume has also declined. Even for a wealthy foundation, 1.3 million euros is no small amount.
Nevertheless, with the second course of the model project, the Robert Bosch Hospital can prove that it has learned from its mistakes. This one is supposed to have its final exam in the summer of 2022. Moreover, the trust in the project no longer seems to be too great – even though the number of new refugees in Baden-Württemberg recently doubled. There is no third cohort.
