Nom_de_Guerre_23

Head doctor of the ward is a rather unlucky translation of the German Stationsarzt. The Stationsarzt is a resident (Assistenzarzt), a physician in training (5 years minimum in Germany), who covers a ward with no other intermediate more senior resident between them and their attending (Oberarzt).

Head doctor of the ward is a rather unlucky translation of the German Stationsarzt. The Stationsarzt is a resident (Assistenzarzt), a physician in training (5 years minimum in Germany), who covers a ward with no other intermediate more senior resident between them and their attending (Oberarzt).

A real head of department physician (Chefarzt) makes north of €200k/year. ENT physicians who finished their residencies and go into private practice are in the €180k/year region.

Germany has had a history of very long inpatient stay durations because of the way billing used to work until the early 00s. The longer patients stayed on the wards, the more money the hospital earned. And patients whom you only had to babysit with no real aftercare had the best reimbursement-effort ratio. This changed sharply with a new system after 2003 where now shorter stays pay better and the mean duration (overall) went down from 13.3 days in 1992 to 7.2 days in 2018. 7.2 days per stay is still the forth place worldwide among developed nations.

Still, the legacy of this lives on in many fields.

Doctor but thanks. :)

More or less. It's hard to compare because seniority among residents in Germany (Jungassistent/Altassistent) is more flexible and less defined by official roles or PGY-status. You can be a Stationsarzt often very early on. In some specialties it barely means that you don't need much babysitting and it can be during PGY-1.