Towards a new approach for the monitoring of lifestyle in the Netherlands

Data on lifestyle of the Dutch population are collected by different institutes, each in their own field of work, such as smoking, drug use, exercise and nutrition. Besides that also Statistics Netherlands, the Social and Cultural Planning Office (SCP) and the Municipal Health Services collect information on lifestyle. This provides valuable information for policy, research and practice. But these different data sets are not always perfectly matched, and when combined show both gaps and duplications. The Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport (VWS) needs more efficiency and coordination in these data sets, and wants ‘the monitoring activities to be reduced to a minimum sound base as the source for government information’. This should lead to quality improvement and should prevent that multiple (different) national figures on an indicator to be brought out.

The Dutch National Institute of Public Health and the Environment (RIVM), together with all relevant monitoring bodies outlined in the past year a proposal to improve lifestyle monitoring. In this Spectrum, this proposal is described by Carolien van den Brink and colleagues. Subsequently, a number of institutes involved (Ciel Wijsen of Rutgers WPF, Boudewijn Breedveld of Voedingscentrum, Saskia Booker of GGD Nederland, Karin Klein Wolt of VeiligheidNL and Robert Gelinck of NISB) respond to these plans. Finally, Wil de Zwart of the Ministry of Health presents her vision on this new initiative.