Groningen Centre for Health Law

Recently, three institutions in Rotterdam jointly wrote a letter to the city’s mayor to ask the municipality to adopt a smoking ban for the streets that connect their premises via municipal regulation. The parties – the city’s main university hospital, university of applied sciences, and one of the city’s secondary schools – are all located next to or near to each other. In order to protect their students, staff, patients, and visitors, they want to create a smoke-free zone in and immediately around their premises. While the institutions can adopt smoke-free policies on their own premises, they prefer a fully smoke-free zone because they do not want to send smokers who violate their internal smoking policies to neighbouring institutions who likewise try to enforce their own smoking ban.

Traditional health care, including herbal and faith-based healing, is practised in many countries across the world. In Ghana, it has played a key role in providing health care over the past centuries and is still widely used as an alternative to allopathic medicine. It is speculated that around 80% of Ghanaians first turn to traditional health providers before making use of allopathic clinics.[1]

Op 15 juni 2018 stuurde Minister Bruins een notitie over dwanglicenties aan de Tweede Kamer. In deze briefing maken wij een aantal voorlopige opmerkingen op de notitie van de Minister.

In celebration of her upcoming PhD defence on 28 May, Voices in the Field interviewed Eva Zhang about her experience as a researcher specialising in the right to health in China.

The sugar tax does not receive the attention it deserves in the Netherlands. Research indicates that a price increase of fizzy drinks in particular can reduce its consumption. It is time for a more concerted governmental, societal, and scientific debate in the Netherlands about the pros and cons of this measure.

In January of 2017, I wrote a blog post for Global Health Law Groningen about the global health effects of the 2016 U.S. election. I wrote it a few days before the inauguration of a new president. At that time, I made some predictions about the likely effects of the election on the U.S. role in global health.

This month the European Commission published  Innovative Payment Models for High-Cost Innovative Medicines , a report of the Expert Panel on effective ways of investing in Health (EXPH).

The World Health Organization (WHO) has been a constant advocate for the promotion of taxation on sugary beverages in order to combat the rise of non-communicable diseases (NCDs). In January 2014, the Mexican government enacted a law with a taxation rate of 10%, an increase of one peso, on sugary beverages. At the time, 32.8% of the Mexican population was obese, and the country was considered to have the largest obesity rate in the world, according to the United Nation’s Food and Agricultural Organization. Studies show that Mexico’s sugar tax led to a continuous decrease in consumption seen within its first two years of implementation.  This raises the question:  To what extent would it be effective to implement taxation on sugary beverages as seen in Mexico in 2014, within the Netherlands?