Research on the Health Care System

The level of health care in Germany is very high. All population groups have secure access to the services of the health care system. However, demographic developments and the implementation of medical progress place great challenges on the further development of the health care system. People in Germany are reaching increasingly higher ages. This means that they must also be provided medical, rehabilitation and care services for a longer period of time. At the same time, the spectrum of illnesses is also changing. Chronic illnesses and multimorbidity play increasingly important roles in determining treatment decisions. Thanks to medical progress, new and sometimes groundbreaking diagnostic and therapeutic procedures are developed that offer great benefits for patients but also generate higher costs.

To live up to this challenge, the federal government not only supports clinical and basic research in medicine but also research in the effective structuring of the health care system, medical treatment and prevention.

The spectrum of research ranges from the causes of illnesses to investigation of options for treatment, prevention and the elimination of factors that promote illness. The supply structures and processes within the health care system are also included in the research subsidisation to ensure that these develop appropriately to meet the rising demands and can be adapted or optimised as needed. The results of this research are directly relevant for prevention and care, providing benefits to each individual.

In order to structure preventive and medical care more effectively in line with the demands and improve them where required, it is necessary to know the areas in which deficits arise as well as why they occur, whether the distribution of illnesses and risk factors over various population groups is unequal (i.e. whether specific groups are affected more severely) and how the identified problems can be solved. These questions are therefore addressed in many subsidisation measures of the government programme “Health Research: Scientific Research for the People”. The following focus areas of subsidisation are of particular note:

- Centres of genetic epidemiological methods
- Infectiology
- Pain research
- Competence networks in medicine
- Children and adolescents survey
- Rehabilitation research

In the last five years, the BMBF has also initiated special subsidisation activities in the following areas:

- Health care research
- Prevention research
- Research on general medicine
- Nursing research

Approximately 20 million EURO have been provided for these areas by the BMBF.