Bunter Kreis (Help Circle) of Children’s Hospital in Winnenden receives €20,000

The hospital for children’s and adolescents’ medicine has set up a branch of the Bunter Kreis. It is intended to help disabled or prematurely born children make the transition to the home environment when they are discharged into the world after a prolonged period of hospitalization. In many cases, the parents and carers are overtaxed by the new task and this results in the so-called revolving door syndrome: That means children have to be readmitted to hospital shortly after being discharged. As a sociomedical aftercare service, the Bunter Kreis, together with mobile nursing care, is intended to guarantee outpatient care in the home environment. It functions as a link, also to registered pediatricians or early pedagogic and therapeutic intervention programs, and provides parents with fast and unbureaucratic help on the spot.

“The work of the Bunter Kreis at the children’s hospital in Winnenden is very important and we consider it to be absolutely deserving of support. For that reason we will support the children’s hospital next year, too,” said Rober Mayr, board member of the Eva Mayr-Stihl Foundation, at a meeting with Prof. Ralf Rauch, senior consultant of children’s and adolescents’ medicine in Winnenden.

The first Bunter Kreis was established in Augsburg in the early 1990s. In the meantime, the federal Bunter Kreis association has more than 80 aftercare stations throughout Germany. They all support seriously and chronically ill children and adolescents and their families in the process of integration into life at home after they leave hospital. The main aim of the federal association is make high quality aftercare facilities available across the whole of Germany.