The healthcare sector is driving the jobs market, but can it continue growing? Forests are to hide wind parks, it’s the wrong time for the Africa appeal and a drugs raid causes diplomatic embarrassment. It’s all in the Dutch dailies.

Health and jobs
It shouldn’t be surprising at this time of year that there appears to be no dominating domestic news in the papers. They all feature a range of stories, but little leaps off the page.

De Volkskrant surprises us with the news that the health sector is now “the motor of the jobs market”. Over the last decade, we’re told, over half a million new jobs have been created and 98 percent of them have gone to women. The healthcare sector provided 385,000 of all these new positions.

The explosive growth in health sector jobs as resulted from the increase in the numbers of elderly in need of care. But this cannot go on, warns the paper, as healthcare costs are increasing faster than GDP.

The paper says technical innovation will have to ensure that standards of care remain stable, while holding costs down. “We’ll have to see to it that the elderly are able to carry on living independently for longer,” says an expert.

Nrc.next also homes in on spiralling health costs, telling us that hospitals have been ordered to reduce the number of treatments they offer starting from next year. The idea is to specialise in areas where they already excel.

The paper says hospitals have become companies which must operate at a profit. It gives an example of a gynaecology department which is having to take on more elderly incontinence patients because that particular treatment is profitable.

Taking care of pregnant women who are unable to give birth at home, on the other hand, does not cover the costs involved in the treatment. A gynaecologist says it’s absurd that a good hospital could in theory go bankrupt because it’s carrying out too much of this sort of essential work.

Wind forests generate income
It’s not just in the healthcare field that profitability is the overriding concern. Trouw says that the National Forestry Commission is planning to combine the creation of new woodlands with the development of wind parks.

It’s reckoned that the energy generated by the wind turbines should be able to pay for the upkeep and management of whole forests. Plans are apparently already in place for around 600 hectares of ‘wind forests’ in the province of North Holland.

The paper reminds us that finding locations for wind parks in the Netherlands is difficult because of public opposition to the enormous wind turbines which are considered an eyesore.

Combining wind parks and new woodlands has the advantage that, once the area is open to the public for walking and other leisure activities, the trees will have grown sufficiently to block the turbines from view.

Wrong time to collect for Africa
Trouw also finds a corner of its front page to inform us that the Dutch emergency appeal for the Horn of Africa famine is off to a slow start. In over a week, just over two million euros have been collected.

We’re told it’s the wrong time of the year to collect for Africa, with many people going away on holiday. The famine, despite the horrifying pictures on TV, is also said to lack drama. “Very different from sudden flooding or an earthquake,” says a charities spokesperson.

De Telegraaf also covers the subject on its front page, saying people are giving, but nothing like as generously or as quickly as during Live Aid in 1985. But this paper comes up with a different explanation for the lack of success so far.

It says people in the West don’t understand how the worst famine in 60 years can be taking place despite the millions of euros’ worth of aid which has been pumped into the region. The Dutch ambassador in Nairobi explains that the money was spent on short-term relief “without thinking about structural change”.

Drugs raid causes diplomatic row
The Netherlands has apologised to Suriname following a police drugs raid on The Hague residence of its acting ambassador, David Abiamofo, reveals AD.

The interim ambassador’s residence is registered in the name of the sister of what AD describes as an “important intermediary between South American drugs traffickers and the Italian Mafia”. The paper says the police hoped to pick up two Mafia members in the operation.

During the raid, which took place on Saturday, Mr Abiamofo is reported to have been forced to lie flat for an hour on a sofa, while his wife and children looked on. When he identified himself as a diplomat, officers are reported to have told him: “You can be the Queen for all we care, we’re still going to carry out the raid”. Dutch police deny this version of events.