An external committee consisting of leading national scientists as well as prominent scientists from abroad assessed NIVEL research in October 2010. The committee praised the productivity and social relevance and judged NIVEL to be excellent on these criteria. Quality and viability were assessed as being very good.

On 14/10/2011 the three WHO Collaborating Centres on Primary Health Care based in Europe and a representative of the WHO Regional Office for Europe gathered in Ghent (Belgium) to get acquaintanced with each other’s work and to explore future collaborations.

The placebo effect occurs in every treatment. In research, the placebo effect is usually seen as noise or nuisance: something that needs to be controlled for in order to discern the effect of a medical treatment. Professor in health psychology Jozien Bensing tries a different approach. She is using her Spinoza Prize for research on how the placebo effect can be used to promote patients’ healing. The first results about this research have been published in Patient Education and Counseling.

Changing the donor registration systems is not expected to result in more donor organs. We better try to solve the bottlenecks in the donation process within hospitals and to reduce the number of refusals by next of kin, as NIVEL research shows, based on which study Remco Coppen took his doctor’s degree on 3 September at Tranzo, Tilburg University in the Netherlands.