Expansion of 2015 Commonwealth Fund International Health Policy Survey to Include the Netherlands

The 2015 International Health Policy Survey – the 18th in the annual series – will assess primary care physicians’ views of their country’s health care system and its capacity to ensure access to high-quality, safe, efficient, and patient-centered care. The 2015 survey will include representative samples of physicians in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The findings, which will be released at the Fund’s 2015 International Symposium and summarized in an article for Health Affairs, should generate substantial interest among health ministers, policymakers, researchers, and the media. The Netherland’s participation in the survey since 2006 has been made possible by external funding through a partnership established by IHP with the Dutch Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport and the Scientific Institute for Quality of Healthcare (IQ Healthcare) Radboud University Nijmegen. In addition to enabling the Fund to maintain the Netherlands as a comparator country in its analyses of the survey data and in Mirror, Mirror, Dutch inclusion in the survey is an important factor in gaining participation of the Dutch Health Minister and senior government officials at the International Symposium.