Five questions for Charlotte Ariane Krumbholz

What exactly do you do at the Charité?
I have been working as a nurse at the Charité in Mitte since 1991. Since then, I have been working as part of an interdisciplinary intensive care unit with a Post-Anesthesia Care Unit (or PACU for short). The reason I value working in an interdisciplinary intensive care unit so highly is because the work is especially varied and the treatment spectrum includes multiple specialties. So we don’t just treat patients with heart problems, for example, but also a diverse range of health challenges.

Of course, we also experience a lot of suffering in a ward like this, with people often experiencing not just physical but also emotional emergencies – whether that be patients or their relatives. You certainly need to learn to cope with that in the beginning. But for me, it is important not to leave people high and dry. And we also experience a lot of positive situations, when we see patients whom we have been treating for as long a week in some cases, who are now well enough to leave our ward. It is especially wonderful if the patients come back to visit us afterwards – in their normal clothes, upright and healthy.   
 

How did you come to work at the Charité?
I originally qualified as an electrician, but in the 1990s, I decided I wanted a change. Then, literally overnight, I received the offer from the Charité to start training as a nurse at the original Charité in Mitte. I have known the Charité since I was a child, so the decision wasn’t all that difficult. What really surprised me was that I quickly noticed that there were areas where I was able to apply my electrician’s skills. Technology also plays a role when you’re training as a nurse. During my training, I realized that I wanted to work in an intensive care unit, and the Charité allowed me to do just that.
 

Why do you like working at the Charité?
The Charité has been a part of my life for decades and supported me even during my childhood – back then as a patient and now as an employee. When I think back to how I got to know the Charité during the 1970s and how I experience it today, it’s clear that the hospital has changed a lot. "I like the fact that the Charité is willing to continuously develop. That’s one of the reasons I became a staff council representative: so that I could play an active role in the further development of the Charité.

What do you want for your professional and personal future?
I want to be healthy and able to continue to fulfil my duties in the intensive care unit effectively until the end of my career. I also want to learn more about the needs of my patients. After all, patients measure the success of a treatment very differently from how we do as practitioners. There are simply different needs in play, and of course that’s also due to our capacity. I think it would be fantastic to move closer to the relevant need, and to achieve this I have become a union member with ver.di and have been elected staff council representative. Good labor agreements not only ensure better working conditions, but also improve medical care for patients.

It’s also very important to me that everyone feels welcome at the Charité – just as they are or as they wish to be. The Charité should be a place where there is no discrimination against any dimension of diversity. We need a new understanding of “normal”. And I personally am working on helping to achieve that. I want to change the Charité so that people of all genders can find a place here where they feel comfortable, where they are accepted just as they are in terms of gender identity or expression. It was to this end that I was appointed to the Charité Board as Representative for Gender Diversity.

 

What of what you have recently seen at the Charité has moved you the most?
What’s moved me the most, recently? Unquestionably, it was the call for volunteers to help out following the disastrous flooding in Ahrweiler in the summer of 2021. I signed up along with a friend at the Charité. It was clear to us that these were people in distress who needed help. So we signed up. In just a few hours, around one hundred of our colleagues had added their name to the list of helpers. None of us knew any of the details: how will we get there? Where will we sleep? But so many people were prepared to help others in need. That showed me that the people who work here don’t simply come in every day, do their jobs and then go home. People who work in health care come with the idealism needed for the job.