How many medicine cups does Dutch healthcare use?

How we estimated it

There is no official figure for the number of medicine cups used in healthcare. So we built a bottom-up estimate, using public figures on the number of beds, residents and clients per sector. Those figures come from Statistics Netherlands (CBS), the National Institute for Public Health and the Environment (RIVM) and the Long-term Care Act (Wlz). We multiply them by the number of cups per person per day.

That last number is the weak spot. Care organisation Amstelring used 629,000 plastic medicine cups in a year, for about 1,500 residents. That is just over one cup per resident a day. This is the only published consumption figure we found. The other consumption figures come from our own interviews. Source (details and source) We held those interviews around the turn of 2024 to 2025 with buyers, hospital pharmacists and nurses at more than 100 healthcare organisations.

Because consumption per person is uncertain, we give a range. The low estimate allows for organisations that already use fewer cups, for example because the pharmacy supplies medication in multi-dose pouches, one for each administration time. The high estimate assumes full occupancy and more liquid medication.

Two ways to count hospitals

For hospitals we used two separate methods. The first starts from the beds. We take the number of beds, the occupancy rate and the number of cups per patient per day. To that we add the cups used in day admissions, at the emergency department and in outpatient clinics. The second starts from the consumption per hospital site that we heard in our interviews, multiplied by the number of sites. Both results fall within the range above.

Public sources by sector

• Hospitals. VZInfo on organisations (opens in a new tab), beds (opens in a new tab), admissions (opens in a new tab), length of stay (opens in a new tab) and emergency departments (opens in a new tab), with data from Statistics Netherlands (CBS). Occupancy comes from Eurostat (opens in a new tab).
• Nursing and care homes. ActiZ (opens in a new tab) on residents and places, the waiting list report of Zorgverzekeraars Nederland (opens in a new tab) and ZorgkaartNederland (opens in a new tab) for the number of organisations.
• Disability care and mental health care. The Monitor Langdurige Zorg (opens in a new tab) on the use of care under the Long-term Care Act (Wlz).
• Medication in pouches. SPHC (opens in a new tab) on the automated medication distribution system, in which the pharmacy supplies medication per administration time.

All sources except Eurostat are in Dutch.

What this is not

This is our own estimate. It has not been checked by an external party. It says nothing about how many cups we sell. It shows how big the problem is that we are working on.

Updated 11 October 2026.