BACKGROUND In the Netherlands municipalities are legally required to draw up a Local Health Policy Memorandum every four years. This policy memorandum should be based on (local) epidemiological research as performed by the Regional Health Services. However, it is largely unknown if and in what way epidemiological research is used during local policy development. As part of a larger study on kno...

How do shared problems affect politics and policy in a divided society? We examine some common intuitions about preference polarization and policy-making in light of such problems and show that the relationships they imply are fundamentally contingent. When actors’ individual costs from a policy addressing a commonly shared problem differ, their preferences over the appropriate policy respond a...

This paper focuses on the lack of dialogue and policy consonance between those taking the lead in health systems change and those developing specific disease control strategies. In the first part, the origins and characteristics of this situation are explained using, as an example, TB control. Attention is then paid to the development of disease control friendly health systems. Four aspects of ...