Kralingen GP practice no longer accepts international students without a European health card

Jans Huisartsen, a practice in Kralingen that mainly focuses on students, has stopped accepting international students without a European health card since January. The university offers three alternatives for students from outside the EU.

“We couldn’t handle it any more”, practice manager Luc Jansen says over the phone. The practice is spending too much time explaining the Dutch healthcare system, dealing with complex administration, requesting and translating medical records from abroad, and explaining why you don’t get antibiotics in the Netherlands if you have a sore throat, he says.

“It sometimes takes up entire consultations”, Jansen says. “We want to safeguard the quality of care. That’s why we’ve decided to stop accepting this group.” Patients without a European health card who were already registered with Jans Huisartsen will remain registered. “Nothing will change for them.”

Alternatives

The university offers three alternative GPs that do accept students without a European health card: Huisarts31, Huisartspraktijk Fonderson and HuisDoc.

“Since August, we’ve been completely flooded with international students wanting to register with us”, an employee of HuisDoc says. “We’ve even had to turn down applications because so many were coming in. It’s a huge increase. Really huge.”

A shame

Jansen thinks it is ‘a real shame’ that his practice can no longer provide care to students from outside the EU: “You come to the Netherlands, and you can’t find a home or access healthcare. You have expectations when you come to the Netherlands, but they aren’t met. I wish students coming from outside Europe could simply be given Dutch health insurance.”

Jans Huisartsen opened its doors in 2021, after research by EM found that international students often struggle to find a GP. Applications from international students – with and without a European health card – came flooding in. Of the ten thousand patients Jans Huisartsen now has, around three thousand do not have a European health card.