The Netherlands

Lung Alliance is the national coalition for preventing and caring for chronic lung diseases in the Netherlands. It brings together patient associations, professional associations, health insurers and companies from across the pulmonary field.

The alliance joined the IRC in 2023. It is an IRC grant recipient, supporting its work on evidence-based vaccination guidelines for people with chronic respiratory disease.

Chronic lung disease affects 1.2 million people in the Netherlands. Each year, 42,000 people are hospitalised with severe breathlessness and 7,000 people die from COPD alone, at an estimated healthcare cost of €1.2 billion. While evidence-based guidelines exist, they are not applied consistently: care remains fragmented, transitions between primary and secondary care are unreliable, and funding structures do not incentivise collaboration, prevention or follow-up.

In 2026, the alliance adopted a four-year strategic programme (2026–2029) to close this gap, focusing primarily on asthma and COPD. At its centre is the ‘Improvement Agenda for Transmural Interdisciplinary Lung Care’, a shared reference framework identifying the critical transition points in the patient journey where collaboration across care settings must improve. The agenda covers five core themes that follow the patient journey — growing up with asthma, prevention in existing lung disease, diagnosis and exacerbation management, medication and adherence, and palliative care in COPD — and is driven forward in four steps:

1. Jointly describing what good interdisciplinary care looks like
2. Formulating process parameters to make progress visible
3. The field takes ownership of implementation
4. The alliance drives change through national dialogue and benchmarking data

Within this agenda, Lung Alliance acts as connector, describer and agenda-setter as well as driver of change — bringing parties together, documenting what good care looks like, and holding the field to account for shared progress. It is deliberately not a healthcare provider, regulator or standard-setter: implementation and outcomes remain the responsibility of the field itself.

Chronic respiratory disease (asthma, COPD)

Royal Dutch Society for Physiotherapy
Royal Dutch Society for the Advancement of Pharmacy
Knowledge Centers for Complex Chronic Lung Diseases
Lung Foundation Netherlands
Netherlands Respiratory Society
Netherlands Association of Physicians for Lung Diseases and Tuberculosis
Dutch Dietetic Association
Dutch Association of Lung Function Analysts
COPD Foundation and Asthma General Practitioners Advice Group and the National Association of General Practitioners
Inhalation Medication Instruction School Foundation
Dutch and Davos Asthma Association
Nurses & Carers Netherlands