Walking into a hospital's emergency department looks like the obvious shortcut when the GP has no slots left, and nothing at the door stops anyone doing it. Two features of the Dutch system — the order in which patients are seen, and how the resulting bill is treated — make that shortcut work out differently than expected.
You can walk into a hospital's spoedeisende hulp (SEH, emergency department) without a referral, and nothing at the door stops you — but it's rarely the right call for anything that isn't genuinely urgent. Two things make it a worse choice than it sounds: triage means you're seen in order of medical severity, not arrival time, so a non-urgent complaint can mean hours in a waiting room behind people who are actually in crisis; and unlike a huisarts (GP) visit, ER care isn't excluded from your eigen risico (deductible), so a self-referred visit that turns out to be minor can land you a bill of a few hundred euros you'd have avoided by calling first. It's the right move without hesitation for anything genuinely acute — a broken bone, a deep wound, chest pain, anything where a delay could make things worse, the same threshold where 112 would also be reasonable. For everything in between, calling first — your huisarts during the day, the huisartsenpost outside hours — gets you triaged over the phone, and if it genuinely needs the ER, that's exactly where they'll send you, sometimes with a heads-up call ahead that speeds things up on arrival. Skipping straight there mainly buys you a longer wait and a bigger bill for the same outcome.