Germany

Since the early 1990s the German hospital sector has been in an ongoing process of restructuring. The most obvious signs for this are a continuing decline in the number of hospitals and hospital beds and a growing number of hospital privatisations. Concerning the latter there have been two waves of privatisations so far. The first wave started in the early 1990s and following German unification was very much concentrated on eastern Germany. A second wave started after 2000 and now covers the whole of Germany. The current wave hit its temporary peak with the first privatisation of a university hospital, involving the universities of Marburg and Gießen at the beginning of 2006.