Medical officer
In Germany, a medical officer in the narrow sense of the word is a doctor who works in an official position in the health administration - such as a health department - or a lower health authority. In Austria , on the other hand, only the civil servant head of the sanitary department of a district administrative authority bears this title; in Switzerland the head of the health service in a community is called this. Public health officers in Germany are in particular specialists in the public health system . In colloquial usage is as a medical officer of working for a social security institutions often medical examiner called.
In Germany, the prerequisite for further training as a medical officer is a successful medical degree and a license to practice medicine . This training lasts 5 years, including six months at a public health academy . Further training content and regulations are regulated by the respective medical associations of the federal states in their further training regulations.
In Lower Saxony the law on the public health service (NGöGD), the description since 1 January 2007 due to the medical officer or health officer be performed only by physicians who are one in the public health service district or a county-level city with the area name public health work.
An older term for medical officer is physics doctor . In earlier centuries it was the city doctor (Stadtphysicus) to whom the official medical duties in today's sense were assigned by the authorities .
