The Health Service in Amsterdam

A FTER the first war there was a serious shortage of hospital beds in the City of Amsterdam, whose population is some 800,000. One method of dealing with this emergency was for the Public Health Authority to set up a centralizing agency which dealt with every request for the admission of a patient to hospital. These requests were fully investigated by members of the Health Authority staff, and suitable places were found for patients in different hospitals in the city and even in the surrounding parts of the country. This imposed something of a strain on the family doctors at first, but there were