The Netherlands has 25 RAV regions. The Dutch Minister of Health, Welfare and Sport (VWS) has designated a Regional Ambulance Service (RAV) in each region, which is responsible for ambulance care.

25

The Netherlands has 25 RAV regions. The Dutch Minister of Health, Welfare and Sport (VWS) has designated a Regional Ambulance Service (RAV) in each region, which is responsible for ambulance care.

25

On 31 December 2019, the RAVs had 832 ambulances available in the Netherlands.

832

In the Netherlands, ambulances and ambulance crews are available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

In 2019, there were 832 ambulances. In practice, however, not all 832 ambulances are responding to calls at the same time. Part of the available capacity is reserved for large-scale accidents or emergencies or for maintenance or damage to vehicles and during overlapping shifts.

To distribute the ambulances throughout the region as effectively as possible, every RAV has a number of ambulance posts.

241

In many regions, particularly during the day, crews are in a state of dynamic readiness. At the end of an assignment, the ambulance does not return to a post, but remains on the road. If this ambulance is given a new assignment in the case of dynamic readiness, no call-out time is involved.

The number of posts varies from region to region. In the National Reference Framework for Distribution & Availability, an optimal theoretical distribution of posts was calculated to comply with the starting point that under normal circumstances, 95% of the population must be reached within fifteen minutes of the start of the report to the ambulance dispatch centre.

In 2019, there were 1.346.055 ambulance deployments in the Netherlands.

1.346.055

In 2019, there were 1,346,055 ambulance deployments in the Netherlands. The number of deployments increased by over 23,000 deployments compared with 2018 (1.75%).

In 2019, there were 6,353 staff, spread over 5,687 FTEs.

6.353

The number of ambulance care staff rose from 5,730 in 2015 to 6,353 in 2019. This is an increase of more than 10%.

The ambulance sector has traditionally been a male-dominated sector, but the ratio is gradually shifting and there are more and more women. In 2019, 63% of staff were men and 37% women.

Both nurse and non-nurse operators work in the dispatch centre. The nurse dispatch centre operator is responsible for the dispatch centre process, handles the details and ensures a responsible implementation of the process of intake, care needs assessment, care assignment and care instruction. The non-nurse operator is usually deployed on the logistic process of issuing ambulance calls.

The national average sickness absence rate within the ambulance care sector in 2019 was 5.1%.

5,1%

The average sickness absence rate in 2019 was 5.1%.

This percentage fell in 2019 compared with 2018, when the rate was 5.4%

627.000.000

The macro budget for ambulance care is determined every year in the national budget.

The macro budget in 2019 was €627 million. For this macro budget, ambulance care is available 24/7 throughout the entire year and 1,346,055 deployments took place in 2019.

At the end of 2019, the population of the Netherlands was almost 17.3 million. In other words, ambulance care in 2019 cost an average of approximately €36.24 per inhabitant.