First I will give you an international comperison of the health of the Dutch population. After that I will discuss the ways ill which some parties try to enhance quality of care, namely the government and health care organizations. Finally, I will describe to you in general some problems that exist at the moment within the health care field, and also some ways in which solutions for these problems are sought,
But let's first look at the international comparison. We will compare the figures on the Dutch population with the same figures for other European countries. I will not trouble you with too much figures, so I selected some measures. These are: life expectancy, infant mortality, and the prevalence of cardiovascular diseases and lung cancer.
Screen 17 (introduction: good quality?; international comparison)
What you can see on this screen is a comparison between the best outcomes, the worst outcomes and the outcome for the Netherlands. It means that the closest the yellow bar is to the purple bar, the better the health status for our country. As you can see for life cxpectancy, infant mortality and cardiovascular diseases the Dutch health status is not too far away from the best health status. Lung cancer, however, still poses a problem to our society, and the same goes for breast cancer which is not represented here. On the whole, however, you can say that the Netherlands are among the countries with a favorable health status.
Screen 18 (Introduction: Good quality?; government laws and programmes)
In the last few years specific measures have been taken to resolve and improve tile quality of health care, Tile government has brought some laws into force that aim for a better quality of
