Patients and therapists are planning legal action to force the Dutch state to cut waiting lists for mental health care.

Stichting Recht op GGZ, a non-profit organisation, says the state is breaching people’s human rights by making them wait to be treated for conditions such as depression, trauma and eating disorders.

Recent figures from the health insurers’ association NZa indicate that around 55,000 patients have had to wait longer than the statutory 14 weeks to start treatment. Insurers acknowledge there is a problem but say the numbers are inflated.

Stichting Recht op GGZ says access to healthcare is being “unacceptably obstructed” by the waiting lists, with some patients having to wait years for treatment.

“People are dying on the waiting lists,” Manon Kleijweg, a psychiatrist and member of the organisation’s management committee said.

Kleijweg said part of the problem was that mental health care is funded on the basis of an average price for treatment, which acts as a disincentive for insurers to finance the most complicated and expensive cases. As a result, patients with the most acute care needs end up waiting longer.

“Real crisis”

“If one insurer decides: ‘enough is enough, I’m going to purchase extensive healthcare for this group of severe patients,’ all the most vulnerable patients will switch to that insurer,” she told Nu.nl.

“Nobody dares to stick their head above the parapet because they need to keep on an even keel financially. It’s down to the state to make changes.”

GroenLinks-PvdA MP Lisa Westerveld called for the government to make access to mental health services a priority.

“We’ve been hearing all week about a crisis that people are ‘experiencing’, but we want to talk about the real crisis: people who are on a waiting list while they urgently need help.”

One thing the cabinet could do is enforce the insurers’ duty to provide healthcare. “Wat’s the point of a legal duty of care in practice if all the agreed limits on waiting times are exceeded?”

Distorted figures

Insurers told NOS they were willing to take responsibility for the waiting lists, but pointed to research indicating that the numbers compiled by the NZa were unreliable.

An unpublished study by the Vrije Universiteit commissioned by VGZ, one of the big four insurers, found that half of all care providers made mistakes when submitting their data, NOS reported.

In some cases clinics multiplied the number of patients on the waiting lists by the number of different mental health conditions they treated.

Health economist Xander Koolman, who led the study, said there was no suggestion clinics were deliberately inflating the figures.

“I put it down to lack of attention and carelessness,” he said. “You can see that a lot of the figures are copied and pasted.”

“We feel responsible for the waiting lists, but we’d like it to be based on good data,” said Marjo Vissers, chair of VGZ’s board of management.