On behalf of the waiting times approach of the Care for Youth Support Team (OZJ), we contribute to reducing waiting times in the Netherlands. In many regions it is clear that there are waiting times, but it is not clear to the municipalities what they can do about it. After all, simply more money is not always the solution; consider the situation where there is more money for help that is already widely available and the result of a larger budget is even more pressure on the labor market. Waiting times are also a very regional problem, with problems varying from region to region.

We are in the process of developing a regional scan for dealing with waiting times, which a municipal region can use to identify for itself what it can do about this problem and – even better – what can be most effective. This scan covers a wide range of possible causes and allows a region to see more concretely where the problems lie.

We hope this will not only address concrete problems of waiting times. We also hope with such an approach to give a region itself insight into what the dynamics of this complex problem is and also develop skills to deal with it structurally together the providers.