‘A Medical Doctor in Politics’. Els Borst-Eilers and the Rise of Evidence-Based Healthcare in the Netherlands

This article examines how Els Borst-Eilers, Dutch minister of Health between 1994 and 2002, pursued the cause of Evidence-Based Medicine (EBM) – an influential movement in the medical field that gained a particularly firm foothold in the Netherlands. It focusses on the way Borst-Eilers operated within the nexus between healthcare and politics, discussing whether or not this made her a boundary person (analogous to the notion of boundary concepts). In particular, the paper analyses how she deliberately cultivated her persona as a specialist minister (‘a doctor, not a politician’) and how she pr... Mehr ...