Overview

• Despite a growing number of therapists, more than half of 2023 appointment requests failed to meet the four-week legal scheduling requirement, leading to multi-month waits.
• The GKV-Spitzenverband board approved a July 2025 positions paper calling for a unified appointment allocation system for psychotherapeutic treatments.
• Under the proposal, psychotherapists would face a legal obligation to report an “appropriate” number of consultation hours and half of their treatment slots to Kassenärztliche Vereinigungen service centres.
• Stefanie Stoff-Ahnis of the insurers’ central association highlighted the acute difficulty severely mentally ill patients face when calling multiple practices and rarely securing callbacks.
• Insurers maintain that optimizing existing capacity through process reforms is preferable to expanding practitioner numbers, which they warn would drive up costs and premiums.