Emergency medicine journal : EMJ
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Emergency medicine in The Netherlands is faced with an increasing interest by politicians and stakeholders in health care. This is due to crowding, increasing costs, criticism of the quality of emergency care, restructuring of out-of-hours services in primary care and the introduction of a training programme for emergency physicians in 2000. A comprehensive search was conducted of published research, policy reports and updated Dutch websites on acute care. ⋯ Although this seems an important step, it does not necessarily imply a good position of the emergency physician in the ED. What the characteristics of the future patient of the Dutch ED will be is dependent on the development of different ED levels of care and GP cooperatives. The lack of empirical research also points out the need for research on quality of care in Dutch ED.