Aside from these three laws, there are laws concerning complaints by patients: in what case and in which way can a patient file a complaint; and furthermore there is a law that regulates the way in which patients can influence health care organizations. All of these laws have been enforced in the last few years.
As a result many health care institutions in the Netherlands have some kind of quality programme. It depends very much on the organization what the quality programme consists of. For the general practitioners it means that they started to develop and to implement protocols for the way in which certain diseases and situations should be handled by GPs.
Home care has its own quality programme, and also the University Hospital Vrije Universiteit has several quality programmes. There are also medical audits in which professionals judge their colleagues.
Some problems/some solutions
Health care is a matter of policy and policy is about making choices. The first choice is: how much is spent on health care in the first place? The second choice concerns the division of the money between the different sectors of health care.
As for the first question, there are two main reasons why health care is under strain:
- technological developments increase the possibilities of treatment, equipment becoming more and more sophisticated and also more expensive;
- the proportional strong increase of the ageing population. People become older and, with the ageing, they become sicker. This means that more people make an appeal to health care.
Both developments put a pressure on health care resources.
