Political endorsement
To get ‘malnutrition’ on the political agendas, we used a stepwise approach.
Our first steps aimed to create awareness. Some of our activities are listed below:
- We meet with (representatives of) our Minister of Health to create awareness of the extent and the additional costs of malnutrition
- We provide annual prevalence data about malnutrition using the annual measurement of care problems
- We get involved with more extensive quality improvement programmes; this appears to be the most effective way to get malnutrition on the different agendas
- We use the support of a professional lobbying company to update us about new political themes and to help us to get access to the right people in the political world
- We organise ‘Malnutrition Lunches’ with representatives of political parties to get wide political support
- We organise press conferences to present malnutrition prevalence data for all health care settings
- We organise visits to allow politicians to meet staff in health care institutions where they can then start to understand the real severity of disease-related malnutrition
To get our practical projects supported and funded, we used the following strategies
- we showed that easy solutions for the treatment of malnutrition are available
- we made sure that all our project plans were aimed at implementation rather than research.
- we worked with, for example, government and health insurance companies to arrange easier access to nutritional supplements in the community
- we used practising healthcare professionals to develop our toolkits and materials thereby enhancing implementation
- our multidiscplinary Dutch Malnutrition Steering Committee is easily accessible and responsive, and, therefore, is always available to support or react to new developments
In 2009, representatives of health ministries from the EU’s Member States; the Czech Presidency of the EU; medical experts; health care officials; representatives of health insurance groups; ESPEN (the European Society for Clinical Nutrition and Metabolism); and ENHA (the European Nutrition for Health Alliance) reached the unanimous conclusion that malnutrition, including disease-related malnutrition, is an urgent public health and health care problem in Europe. Appropriate actions need to be taken to prevent malnutrition from continuing to compromise the quality of life of patients, to cause unnecessary morbidity and mortality and to undermine the effectiveness of our health care systems across Europe.
The Dutch Ministry of Health has identified that malnutrition is as important a national problem as obesity. As a result the Ministry has made screening for malnutrition mandatory in all health care settings in the Netherlands. Dutch health care institutions and home care organisations must, therefore, take an active role in tackling malnutrition. The Dutch Ministry of Health has also funded the majority of the DMG malnutrition implementation projects in hospitals, nursing homes and home care.