With 570 apprenticeship placements and a range of occupational training and continuing education measures, the clinic is one of the largest providers of vocational training and education in the Swabian region.
It has now established its own academy for health-care professions in order to be able to better adapt to the fast-paced changes in the health-care sector as well as to the onset of skilled labour shortage.
The new academy is to provide training also for candidates for new, highly specialised professions. "Other hospitals already report numerous unfilled positions. As yet, this is not the case with us, but the number of applicants is clearly in decline. We therefore develop new proposals", said Bruno G. Wirnitzer, Head of the Academy, during the inauguration event.
Already in the past, the hospital had reacted to the shortage of nursing staff in the operating theatre by establishing training courses for surgical assistants to assist surgeons during surgery. Likewise, there is a palpable shortage of staff in the fields of anaesthetics and intensive care, so that it is likely that soon the clinic will provide also vocational training and education for assistants in these fields.
These vocational training courses are of particular interest to the hospital, because graduates can assume full responsible work much sooner than can nursing staff.
Since work in the wards and health care centres equally creates increasing demand as regards intensified specialisation and additional competences, the academy will significantly develop the course provision in the field of training and continuing education for nursing staff, the other medical assistant professions and physicians as well as for the administrative sector.
"We intend to further qualify also our older members of staff and prepare them for new tasks in compliance with their respective physical condition and wealth of experience. We thus intend to prevent their leaving us in search of other forms of occupation", said Wirnitzer. A large number of courses and seminars are open also to staff from other hospitals.