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HEALTH

One billion Danish kroner assigned for ‘extraordinary’ health service spending

Significant extra funding is to be given to the Danish health service after the government and its parliamentary partners agreed a deal as part of the 2022 budget.

Published: 6 December 2021 16:58 CET
Denmark has an announced an emergency, one-off investment of one billion kroner on health services for winter 2021-22.
Denmark has an announced an emergency, one-off investment of one billion kroner on health services for winter 2021-22. File photo: Henning Bagger/Ritzau Scanpix

The deal means a billion kroner has been set aside for additional spending in extraordinary circumstances, and will be used to retain health sector staff and boost hospital capacity.

Following weekend negotiations, the parties behind the budget revealed that it would include a significant one-off investment in the public health service, which has come under increasing strain due to factors including the Covid-19 pandemic and industrial disputes, notably between nurses and the government.

The money is to be distributed to the regional authorities who can decide how to spend it in consultation with staff organisations, broadcaster DR writes.

As such, it is currently unclear precisely how the spending will resolve issues such as treatment backlogs and staff shortages.

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“Not least because of corona, our health service has been put under a considerable strain and we have therefore decided to put aside an extraordinary one billion kroner for a temporary response during the winter so we can protect our health service, our staff and our patients,” finance minister Nicolai Wammen said during the presentation of the budget.

Health minister Magnus Heunicke also commented on the decision, DR reports.

“It’s very unusual to give a billion kroner to one area in this way as part of a budget. But this is also an unusual situation,” Heunicke said.

The leader of one of the other parties behind the budget, Pia Olsen Dyhr of the Socialist People’s Party, called the decision an “acute solution”.

“But we are obviously not solving the big problem with equal pay or the health service in general. This is an acute solution which is needed at a very, very difficult time after two years with corona,” Dyhr said.

A trade union for social care workers expressed backing for the decision.

“This is a package that is extremely welcome. We’re in an extremely critical situation at hospitals and something needed to be done now. But it’s too early to speculate about what it will mean exactly for our members,” Mona Strib, head of FOA, the union that represents healthcare personnel including hospital social care staff, said in comments reported by DR.

“It could mean that some go from working part time to full time for a while, that some have a high amount of overtime, and that tasks are distributed between staff groups temporarily. We’ll see a hybrid of different solutions,” Strib added.

The deal also includes provisions to extend a freeze on taxation of extra income for people who take on extra jobs related to Covid-19 (such as retirees who work at test centres, for example).

It also earmarks spending to reduce processing times for authorisation of foreign health professionals, an area which is currently subject to severe delays.

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HEALTH

‘Some towns had zero births’: Greenlanders sue Denmark over forced contraception

Henriette Berthelsen was separated from her family at 11 and forced to wear a contraceptive coil, a trauma she buried until she and 142 other Greenlandic women sued the Danish state.

Published: 3 May 2024 11:07 CEST
'Some towns had zero births': Greenlanders sue Denmark over forced contraception

Henriette Berthelsen was separated from her family at 11 and forced to wear a contraceptive coil, a trauma she buried until she and 142 other Greenlandic women sued the Danish state.

“I’ve suppressed so much,” Berthelsen said. “I had an IUD (intrauterine device) fitted nine times since the age of 13, according to my medical records,” the psychologist and activist explained with poise and dignity.

“Luckily — if one can say luckily — they fell out,” she said, her voice cracking, at her home in a Copenhagen suburb. “I remember being in so much pain.” 

Now 66, Berthelsen is one of the 143 Greenland Inuits who have sued the Danish state for violating their rights during its forced contraception campaign from the 1960s to 1980.

Some 4,500 fertile women were forced to undergo the procedure, often without their or their family’s consent.

Denmark carried out the campaign to limit the birth rate in the Arctic territory, which had not been its colony since 1953 but was still under its control.

Berthelsen’s parents never consented to her coils.

At the recommendation of the state, she was sent to Denmark for a year as a young girl to learn Danish and then to a Danish boarding school in Nuuk, Greenland’s capital, far from her hometown of Qeqertarsuatsiaat in southwestern Greenland.

One day, “there was a sign that said that all the girls from the boarding school had to go to the infirmary”, she said.

The IUDs kept falling out, she recalled, holding a photograph of herself from the time — a young girl with long dark plaits.

‘Never contradict a Dane’

For a long time she didn’t tell anyone about her ordeal, remembering what her mother had taught her: ‘Never contradict a Dane’.

For many of her classmates, the experience had a devastating impact.

“In my class there were several girls who were never able to have children,” she said.

Berthelsen herself went on to have two kids.

She is now campaigning to get the Danish state to pay for therapy for the victims living in Denmark.

Greenland already pays such benefits to those living in the territory.

Ebbe Volquardsen, a lecturer at the University of Nuuk, said the women were seeking justice now because the time was ripe.

“It simply takes time for marginalised groups, including Greenlanders within the Danish realm, to develop an awareness of systemic inequality and the ability to articulate it as a problem,” she explained.

One of the victims spoke out in the media several years ago about the trauma she experienced.

A podcast series by Danish public broadcaster DR in 2022 then revealed the extent of the campaign.

“It’s important that the Danish state takes responsibility,” said Berthelsen.

“Some things happened as a result of colonialism” — like “deciding, instead of the people (concerned), whether they are too many or too few, committing a genocide, committing violence and offences against young girls”, she fumed.

Historian Soren Rud told AFP: “In the context of the 2020s, the authoritarian elements of the campaign stood out as a shocking example of how the colonial and post-colonial situation affected the interaction between Greenlanders and Danes.”

‘Big success’

The lawyer for the plaintiffs, Mads Pramming, said one of the documents presented as evidence in the case is a copy of a 1971 review by a doctor extolling the “success” of the policy.

“There were 9,000 fertile women and, in just four years, they inserted an IUD in half of them. So 4,500. And the population dived enormously,” he said.

“Some towns had zero births during that period. After four years they concluded (it was a) big success.”

The large majority of the plaintiffs — the oldest of whom is now 82 — were left with lasting scars.

“Of the 143, about 50 of them had their uterus removed and were not able to have kids, and all of them suffered” physically and mentally, he said.

“Their own testimony is going to be the hardest evidence in the case.”

A fire destroyed many of the women’s medical files but that’s unlikely to change much.

“I don’t think the doctor would put in the medical file that he inserted this IUD in a 12-year-old girl with her crying and being held by two other adults,” Pramming said.

In October 2023, 67 of the plaintiffs filed claims for compensation from the Danish state of 300,000 kroner ($42,000) each.

“All of the requests for compensation will be evaluated by (us),” the health ministry told AFP in an email.

The case comes as Denmark and Greenland are re-examining their past relationship in a historic parliamentary committee.

In addition, researchers have opened a probe specifically into the forced contraception campaign.

Its conclusions are due in mid-2025.

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