Towards a national program for Down syndrome and neural tube defect screening in the Netherlands

A recent change in the Dutch governmental policy gave way to the development of a national program for prenatal screening for Down syndrome and neural tube defects (NTD). Here, we present an overview of the current situation on screening for Down syndrome and NTD in the Netherlands. Secondly, we describe the outline of the emerging organisation of such a national programme. Finally, we present one of the current concerns in the Dutch screening practice, namely the fact that several software programmes for risk calculation, producing dissimilar results, are in use. We stress the importance of central direction of the screening programme to overcome this and other problems.