Financial, Staffing and Societal Sustainability of Dutch Health Care: An Urgent Need for Clear Choices

This open access book analyzes how sound choices can be made in Dutch health care policies, and shows why they are necessary, urgent, and even inevitable. Analyzing the current functioning and funding of the Dutch health care system, this book shows how three dimensions of sustainability - financial, staffing and societal - are under increasing pressure. This study explores priority setting in health care and calls for well-informed, clear and sometimes uncompromising choices in the allocation of means and personnel. This is necessary in order to maintain accessible and high-quality care for all, and to improve public health. Making balanced choices in health care is of particular importance to vulnerable groups whose voices may not be heard as readily or effectively in the public debate, and whose interests are more easily crowded out. Prioritizing in the domain of public health care is first and foremost a political responsibility, but also one for health care providers across the system and ultimately also for citizens. While this work focuses on the Netherlands, similar processes are at play across the developed economies, making it broadly relevant to policy makers, health care professionals and health care (policy) researchers grappling with the questions surrounding the sustainability of public health care.

Dr. Gijsbert D.A. Werner is a is senior research fellow at the Netherlands Scientific Council for Government Policy (WRR - Wetenschappelijke Raad voor het egeringsbeleid). He was the project coordinator of the team responsible for writing this analysis of financial, staffing and societal sustainability of the Dutch health care system. At the WRR, he also worked on reports on climate justice and global population ageing. Previously he worked as an evolutionary biologist studying the evolution of cooperation at the University of Oxford and VU University Amsterdam.

Prof. dr. Arthur van Riel is a senior research fellow at the Netherlands Scientific Council for Government Policy and Professor of Historical Political Economy at the Erasmus University Rotterdam. An historian and economist by training, he worked as an advisor to successive Dutch Finance Ministers before joining the Scientific Council in 2012. His academic work has covered the political economy of the Weimar Republic, the role of political institutions and public policy in Dutch nineteenth century industrialization, the economy of the Dutch Republic, the evolution of private debt and the functioning of the European Monetary Union.

Prof. dr. Mérove I.L. Gijsberts is senior research fellow at the Netherlands Institute for Social Research/SCP and professor by special appointment at the European Research enter of Migration and Ethnic Relations (ERCOMER) at Utrecht University. She temporarily joined the Netherlands Scientific Council for Government Policy/WRR to contribute to this book.

Em. Prof. Dr. Marianne de Visser is a member of the Netherlands Scientific Council for Government Policy. She was chairing the committee which was engaged in the project on financial, staffing and societal sustainability of the Dutch health care system. Her academic work focuses on diagnosis and treatment of neurological and in particular neuromuscular diseases. Previously she has had various administrative functions at the (inter)national level.