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

Ambulance care in the Netherlands is organised regionally in Regional Ambulance Services (RAVs) The RAV is the entity legally appointed to provide ambulance care and maintain the ambulance care dispatch centre.

There are 25 RAVs in the Netherlands. The division into RAV regions is the same as the division into Security Regions under the Dutch Security Regions Act (Wvr).

On 31 December 2023, the RAVs had 967 ambulances available in the Netherlands.

967

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

In 2023, there were 967 ambulances. In practice, however, not all 967 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.

223

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 2023, there were 1,457,863 ambulance deployments in the Netherlands.

1,457,863

In 2023, there were 1,457,863 ambulance deployments in the Netherlands.

In 2023 the number of deployments decreased by over 2.1% compared with 2022.

In 2023, there were 7,397 staff, spread over 6,545 FTEs.

7,397

The number of ambulance care staff rose from 6,174 in 2018 to 7,397 in 2023. This is an increase of almost 20%.

The ambulance sector has traditionally been a male-dominated sector, but the ratio is gradually shifting and there are more and more women. In 2023, 59% of staff were men and 41% 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 2023 was 6.7%.

6.7%

The average sickness absence rate in 2023 was 6.7%.

This percentage decreased in 2023 compared with 2022, when the rate was 7%.

793.000.000

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

The macro budget in 2023 was almost €793 million. For this macro budget, ambulance care is available 24/7 throughout the entire year and 1,457,863 deployments took place in 2023.

At the end of 2023, the population of the Netherlands was almost 18 million. In other words, ambulance care in 2023 cost an average of approximately €44.11 per inhabitant.