I’m so excited to share today’s episode! It’s a special one, told in documentary-style so we could include all the voices of the wonderful healthcare providers I interviewed for this one.
👉 Over the next four episodes, I’m going to take you behind the scenes on my trip to the Netherlands in December. 🎧 🎤🤳🏽 Equipped with a field recording kit and an iPhone, I tried to document my trip for you in sound and images - and I can’t wait for you to hear it.
The Netherlands is a country where more than 99% of people have access to primary care. In the most recent Commonwealth Fund survey comparing access to primary care, its leading the way. I think this graph says it all 👇🏽.
🇳🇱 The Netherlands is a small country compared to 🇨🇦 Canada. Smaller land mass and at 18 million, a smaller population (compared to our 40 million). It’s more ethnically homogenous and has more social equality. It also spends more on publicly funded health care and has 1.6 times the number of doctors.
But despite these differences, I think there is a lot we can learn from them when it comes to primary care.
We’re going to start our four-part series in the Netherlands by visiting a GP practice in Nijmegen, a town of almost 200,000 people that’s about an hour-and-a-half from Amsterdam. You’ll come with me as I shadow Dr. Tim Olde Hartman and Dr. Suzanne Ligthart, two of the GP owners 🩺. As you can see, they work in a beautiful setting.
🤝 We’ll meet other staff at the clinic and learn how they work together to provide timely care to around 9,000 patients—served collectively by the team and eight GP owners who together cover the equivalent of four full-time practices. Here’s a photo of the team on their daily morning coffee break, a wonderful Dutch practice tradition.
It’s fitting that this episode lands during National Nurses Week. As you’ll hear, nurses in the Netherlands play a crucial role in managing chronic conditions—care that’s often handled by family doctors in Canada.
To see more of my photos of the trip to the Netherlands, click here.
So, what’s to come over the next 4 weeks:
💡In Part 2 we’ll continue our visit to Tim and Suzanne’s practice so we can zoom in on what I call “the secret sauce” of the Dutch primary care system.
🏢 We follow Dr. Tim Olde Hartman into Part 3, where you’ll come with me as I visit an after-hours centre in Nijmegen—and then to Amsterdam, where Dr. Ralf Harskamp shows me how after-hours care works in a large urban setting.
🗒️ And in Part 4 I’ll sit down with Rosemary Hannam—who joined me on the trip just before becoming Strategic Advisor on Primary Care at Ontario Health—to reflect on our takeaways.
If you want to dive deeper into what I learned, check out my four-part series “How the Dutch ensure 95% of citizens have a family doctor” in the Medical Post (Apparently I love four-part series 😂) . You can also read our research article: Primary care for all: lessons for Canada from peer countries with high primary care attachment.
A huge thanks to Tim, Suzanne, and their clinic team for letting me shadow them and record our conversations. And to the many other Dutch folks who shared their time and insights—your stories will help shape these next few episodes.
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