[Current situation of allocation of academic medical personnel in ophthalmology departments in Germany]. / Zum Status der Personalplanung für den ärztlichen Dienst in ophthalmologischen Hauptabteilungen in Deutschland.

BACKGROUND: At present minimum nursing staff numbers have been defined and are being implemented. In December 2019 the German Medical Association asked the German professional associations about their general experience with planning of medical personnel in hospital departments. As no structured data were available on this subject, the German Ophthalmological Society (DOG) founded a working group in March 2020 to answer this request. METHOD: In the course of several consensus meetings, the working group on personnel planning for physicians in hospitals of the DOG prepared a questionnaire on previous experiences in personnel planning of eye hospitals, which was sent to the heads of all university eye hospitals and departments of ophthalmology in Germany. The questionnaire consisted of individual items with fixed choices and free answers regarding the procedure and current situation of staffing as well as the range of tasks and organization of the medical service. RESULTS: Out of 104 departments 53 (51%) responded, of which 25 were from university departments (64% response), 23 from departments of other public or non-profit ownership (46%) and 5 from departments with private hospital ownership (33%). Of these 49% stated that there was no transparent basis for calculation of the number of medical positions in their hospital. Of the surveyed departments, outpatient tasks, services and revenues were considered in the calculations in only 47%. There was a statistically significant higher ratio of full-time personnel to the numbers of beds in university departments compared to private and publicly owned non-profit institutions (p < 0.001, t­test). All departments have to cope with multiple additional tasks in addition to clinical patient care, which are taken into account only to a limited extent in the staffing. Approximately 70% of the departments provide a 24 h/7 day (24/7) medical on-call service on site, 91% have a 24/7 surgery on-call service and 34% have a cooperation with emergency services run by the Association of Statutory Health Insurance Physicians. CONCLUSION: The results show how heterogeneously and nontransparent German departments of ophthalmology are staffed in terms of medical doctors. On average, university departments have higher personnel resources per hospital bed to cope with additional tasks in research and teaching. Outpatient tasks, which contribute significantly to the revenues of an eye department, and multiple other tasks are often not taken into account in the personnel calculation. A transparent and uniform basis for calculation of the medical staff of the departments is desirable in order to achieve a sufficient personnel staffing for a patient and employee-oriented working environment.

[Differences in the treatment of exudative age-related macular degeneration in Germany and Great Britain]. / Unterschiede in der Therapie der exsudativen altersabhängigen Makuladegeneration in Deutschland und Großbritannien.

The treatment of age-related macular degeneration with anti-VEGF medications has resulted not only in significant improvements in eye treatment but also in rising costs of ophthalmological therapy. This new treatment has been rapidly introduced into daily practice in Germany with its social security healthcare system and also in Great Britain with its National Health Service. In both countries the most prevalent treatment scheme currently includes three baseline injections of ranibizumab followed by additional injections depending on persisting disease activity.

[Tissue typing in perforating corneal transplantation]. / Gewebetypisierung bei der perforierenden Keratoplastik.

The demand for matched corneal grafts has risen rapidly over the last years. One reason for this is the change in the judgement of the value of tissue and especially HLA typing for prevention of an immune reaction in perforating corneal transplantation. Besides HLA or major antigens, there are other immunologically relevant tissue surface molecules such as the non-MHC antigens of which blood groups and minor antigens are the most important. With regard to effective cost-benefit and waiting time-benefit analyses, differentiated matching strategies are needed to assure optimized utilization and allocation of the still unsatisfactory number of available corneal grafts. With special matching strategies, such as the calculation of the individual waiting time, the consideration of split, non-MHC and HLA antigens, additional HLA loci as well as so-called "permissible" and "taboo" mismatches, much more has to be taken into account in the future than just the numerical correspondence of HLA antigens. This will make it possible to turn from a pure numerical approach to a functional matching strategy. This review summarizes the discussion and different matching strategies, possibilities and limitations of HLA and tissue typing in perforating corneal transplantation.