If everything goes according to plan, other important departments will be relocated from the Wenckebach Hospital in Tempelhof to the Auguste-Viktoria-Klinikum in Schöneberg in the coming month and closed at the previous location.
As Christoph Lang, spokesman for the Vivantes clinic group, to which both hospitals belong, announced that the rescue center and intensive care unit are to move to Grazer Damm in September, as well as the clinics for surgery – visceral and vascular surgery, for accident surgery and orthopedics, for internal medicine / Cardiology and for anesthesia as well as surgical intensive care medicine and pain therapy.
The Senate Health Administration has no reservations about hospital planning and the prospect of the approval for these departments, which represent the heart of a hospital, to move from Tempelhof to Schöneberg in a timely manner.
The Clinic for Internal Medicine – Geriatrics – Center for Geriatric Medicine and the Clinic for Psychiatry, Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics – Gerontopsychiatry will initially remain at the Tempelhof site. But these departments are also supposed to move sometime at a later date, which has not yet been announced. Only the hospice will remain permanently on the Wenckebach Clinic site.
So far, Vivantes is planning to expand the Auguste-Viktoria-Krankenhaus into a state-of-the-art clinic at a cost of 600 million euros (excluding the departments for geriatrics and psychiatry). The share for the departments of the Wenckebach-Klinikum amounts to 242 million euros.
“Just repairing the old structures at the Wenckebach site would cost 154 million euros. But that would still not create a contemporary building,” says Vivantes spokesman Lang.
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As reported, protest against the relocation arose immediately after the decision to close the Tempelhof Clinic in autumn 2020 became known. The citizens’ initiative submitted a corresponding application for residents to the BVV – but without success. In the last meeting before the summer break, the district councilors decided that the district office should work to “ensure that the Wenckebach location is maintained as a health location for acute care”. An application by the CDU to keep the hospital as a so-called portal clinic did not find a majority.
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What will become of the Wenckebach? That’s not decided yet. On request, the Senate Health Administration stated that Vivantes commissioned a study on subsequent use “to determine the supply status and future supply requirements in the region”. This will then be presented in consultation with the district in the district hospital advisory board. Criticism comes from the district CDU. The Union’s health policy spokesman in the BVV, Guido Pschollkowski, said it remained uncertain what would happen there now: “It is strange in any case that now that everything has been decided, a needs analysis is being carried out.”
The senior citizens’ representative of the district argues in a similar way: “It is particularly annoying that the planning for the subsequent use of the Wenckebach is only just beginning; So you consciously accept the decay of the building.” Perhaps the senior citizens’ representatives remembered a bad example from Neukölln.
The women’s clinic there was relocated from Mariendorfer Weg to Rudow in the early 2000s. The listed building stood empty for years and fell into disrepair before conversion to a residential building began a few years ago.
