• Sketch of new Berlin Heart Center close to Westhafen.

    New Heart Center for Berlin

The Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin and the German Heart Center Berlin (DHZB) will pool their competencies from January 2023. By 2028, one of the leading university heart centres in the world is to be built near Westhafen for around 390 million Euro.

State-of-the-art operating theatres and rooms for hybrid operating theatres, cardiac catheter laboratories, computer tomographs, magnetic resonance tomographs – the planned new building for the new Berlin Heart Center of the Charité and DZHB will have the latest equipment. The spatial dimensions also set standards. 300 patients with cardiovascular diseases are to be accommodated there – and a helipad will be built on the flat roof of the 15-storey building which has a usable area of more than 25,000 square metres.

On 13 December, the Board members of the Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin and the German Heart Center Berlin signed an agreement to pool their cardiac medical expertise in the new German Heart Center of the Charité (DHZC). The DHCZ is scheduled to start operating at the beginning of January 2023. It will combine the hospital operations of the DHZB and all cardiac medical facilities of the Charité from the Virchow-Klinikum campus, the Charité Mitte campus and the Benjamin Franklin campus under one roof.

The State of Berlin, the Charité and the DHZB had already agreed on the basis and conditions of the merger in a framework agreement in June of this year. In the future, the DHZB Foundation, in addition to its tasks in the strategic and operational co-management of the DHZC, will be increasingly active in the areas of education, training and further education as well as innovation, development and research and their promotion. 

“The agreement that has been reached ensures that the foundation has strategic and operational co-determination over the DHZC and ensures that our foundation under civil law can sustainably promote outstanding health care, training and, above all, application-oriented research and development in the field of cardiac medicine in the long term and in an optimum way,” says Prof. Dr. Hans Maier, President of the DHZB Foundation Board. Prof. Dr. Heyo K. Kroemer, Chairman of the Board of the Charité, emphasised that the DHZC is a unique opportunity for Berlin to set new international standards in translational cardiac medicine. (Transfer of research results from medicine and health sciences into health care, editor’s note) In the future, the new Heart Center will be “an example of medical progress that will be oriented towards patient care.”

Kroemer also described the associated new building as an “extraordinary building block for the future”. The State of Berlin is financing the construction project with 286.9 million Euro. The Federal government is adding 100 million Euro. The new building will be built from 2023 in the immediate vicinity of the Westhafen on the Spandau ship canal – on the grounds of the Virchow campus. It should be completed in 2028. (vdo)

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