News item | 08-06-2022 | 18:00
Minister for Long-term Care and Sport Conny Helder is working on further reducing administrative regulatory pressure in healthcare. The follow-up program [Ont]Regel de Zorg should increase job satisfaction in the care sector and free up more time to provide care. The ambition of the program is to prevent new regulatory pressure and to simplify or delete existing laws and regulations where possible. In addition, the Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport (VWS) will support healthcare institutions and healthcare employees to reduce unnecessary regulatory pressure in the immediate vicinity.
Minister Helder: “Healthcare employees must be able to spend as much time as possible on providing care. Unnecessary and cumbersome rules, from the government but also from care itself, stand in the way. This paper tower that we have all built together cannot simply be broken down. The program [Ont]Regel de Zorg was only the beginning. In its continuation, we are committed to removing as many unnecessary rules as possible. This way we get less regulatory pressure and therefore more time for care and more job satisfaction.”
[Ont]Arrange the Care
Over the past four years, the program [Ont]Arrange the Care delivered the first positive results. A start has been made on reducing unnecessary or cumbersome rules in many workplaces. As a result, the experienced regulatory burden has decreased slightly for the first time in years. The ministry is very satisfied with this result, but wants to go even further in tackling unnecessary or cumbersome rules. In order to further reduce the regulatory burden, the Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport is looking for close cooperation with partners from the healthcare sector. All parties involved, healthcare providers, healthcare offices, insurers, sector and professional associations and supervisors, have their part to contribute to this joint task.
Uniformize and standardize
The Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport wants to standardize and standardize various matters, including the requirements imposed on care providers, the accountability care providers must render and the requirements that medical aid applications must meet. At the moment, these requirements and obligations differ per health insurer, professional association and supervisor. The standardization of these requirements leads directly to less administrative burdens and thus to time and financial savings.
Local approach for local rules
In addition, the Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport will help care providers and healthcare institutions to reduce local regulatory pressure. Out research it appears that up to 70 percent of the experienced regulatory burden has a local cause. With training courses, subsidy schemes for local projects and the organization of networks of disruptors, the ministry will encourage local identification and remedy of unnecessary regulatory pressure. The Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport wants to start encouraging the local approach in the short term. For example, Minister Helder expects to open up the subsidy scheme for local disruption projects in September 2022. The ministry is preparing a total of 10 million euros for the subsidy scheme.
Also knows [Ont]Arrange the Care an accessible counter where everyone can report signals, bottlenecks and questions in the field of regulatory pressure in healthcare. Care providers and others can thus speak out about what they encounter in the field of regulatory pressure or what are good examples of reducing administrative burdens. Minister Helder calls on healthcare institutions to open a local counter for employees themselves, following this example.
Less new national regulatory burden
In its own national legislation and regulations, the Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport will limit new regulatory pressure as much as possible, for example by means of so-called practical checks to take regulatory burden of legislation and regulations into account at an earlier stage in decision-making. Simplification and relaxation are also the starting point in current legislation and regulations.