New impetus in the organization of the infectious disease control in the Netherlands

Nowadays, with greatly expanded trade and travel, infectious diseases, either naturally occurred or caused by biological terror attacks, can spread fast pace within and across country borders, resulting in potentially significant loss of life, major economic crises, and political instability.
Over the last few years various steps have been taken in the Netherlands to improve the organization of infectious disease control in view of the potential threat of emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases. An important step has been to set up the “Project Network IDC”, a nationwide project that has focused on collaboration, quality, sharing expertise and outbreak management for the local level between 2005 - 2008. One of the steps taken has been to establish seven regional Departments of IDC, in addition to the already existing 30 Municipal Health Services (MHS). This has lead to greater quality and efficiency in the IDC within the public health care. Other focus points have been:

• Greater accessibility of the medical staff
  
• Higher quality of work through a visitation system
  
• Uniformity in working processes by developing and implementing these processes nationwide
  
• Strengthening the ICT infrastructure by developing digital client files and executing a pilot project for the IDC
  
• Improving and extending training and education on outbreak management
  
• Collaboration between the MHS and universities on research and practice
  
• Updating and improving education on the local and national level
  
• Implementing decentralized government tasks, such as curative care for Sexually Transmitted Infections and Sexual Health services
  

With greater involvement, the advantages of collaboration should increase at both local and national level. Overall, efficiency, effectiveness, quality and collaboration in IDC has been improved, and possibilities created to explore new tasks and forms of collaboration between national and local government.