Your safety as a patient

Doctors and other care providers are only allowed to do their job if they have the right qualifications. The ‘BIG register’ provides information about what doctors can do, and about what they’re allowed to do. We check to make sure that all the doctors in our hospital are in the BIG register.

You can check the BIG register yourself to see what your doctor can do and is allowed to do. Would you like to learn more about this? Read more about the BIG Act here.

Doctors at our hospital check their colleagues’ work every year. Nurses also have a review every year, in which they talk to their supervisor about the quality of their work. They also talk about any training they might need.

Our doctors and other care providers take training courses to make sure that their knowledge is up to date. This means that they have all the latest information about medical developments.

You will get the best possible care at our hospital, but treatments come with risks. Sometimes things can go wrong, or something unexpected can happen. We can’t take away all those risks, but we’ve made many arrangements to keep our patients safe. This means that we take away as many risks as possible.

We use a special strategy to keep our patients safe. This strategy lets us identify risks, make improvements, set rules, check to make sure that everyone follows the rules, find the right training courses for our staff and make changes when necessary. We also record any medical mistakes that happen at our hospitals. We use these records to avoid making the same mistakes again later.

We will ask you for your name and date of birth more than once. This is very important for your safety as a patient. We want to be sure that you get the right treatment and medicines, and that you don’t get someone else’s treatment or medicines by mistake.

We do everything we can to ensure proper hygiene and to stop illnesses from spreading. We tell our patients, visitors and employees what they can do to help.

We check the quality and safety of our medical equipment. We make sure that our X-ray machines produce as little radiation as possible. This is safer for patients, visitors and employees.

You can help us ensure that your treatment is safe. Make sure that you prepare for your visit to the hospital, and ask your doctor for the information you need. The safety cards for patients are a useful tool. The NPCF helped us to make these cards. They have tips on them to help you make sure that your treatment is safe.

We are well prepared for a disaster. For us, a disaster is something that happens in or around Utrecht that leaves ten or more people seriously injured. If that happens, we will suddenly have to treat a large number of patients. That’s why we have our Hospital Disaster Response Plan.

If a disaster happens, we know what to do. To prepare for disasters, we take regular crisis training courses together with the fire service, the police and other organisations.