“We now pay for the training for these buddy dogs out of our own pocket,” says Eric Brouwer, general manager at Service dog Netherlands† “We are completely dependent on donations and can therefore only help a limited number of people.” Every week the foundation receives applications from people who qualify for a dog, but it can only train 15 per year. KNGF Guide Dogs suffers from the same problems.
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43.000 euro
Such a dog is not cheap, due to the intensive training and supervision that comes with it. The costs are 43,000 euros, calculated from birth of the dog until it is 10 years old, then service dogs will retire.
Health insurers do not yet reimburse this for people with PTSD, because this type of service dog is relatively ‘new’. “Guide dogs for the blind have been around for 85 years and everyone understands the value of that,” says Brouwer. “The buddy dog for people with PTSD has only been around for about 12 years.” The idea is that there must first be more evidence for the usefulness of the dogs.
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The scientific evidence is now there. Together with the Police Academy Radboud University conducted research into the added value of a so-called buddy dog for people with PTSD. “A buddy dog significantly normalizes the life of someone with PTSD,” says one of the researchers Annika Smit.
The study compared three groups: people with PTSD and a buddy dog, people with PTSD and a family dog (a normal dog), and people without PTSD and a family dog. During testing, the researchers registered the brain activity of everyone. The brain values of someone with PTSD shifted more towards the values of people without PTSD if they had a service dog with them. A family dog did not have the same effect.
Help with nightmares
“A buddy dog wakes someone up with nightmares, for example,” says Smit. “In addition, the buddy dog can literally block contact in situations where tension rises. Simply by standing between the boss and the conversation partner.”
The University of Utrecht also came up with scientific results about this theme. Scientists examined the stress levels in veterans, among other things, on the basis of the stress hormone cortisol. “Results show that their service dog helps veterans better manage their PTSD symptoms,” the University writes.
“The physiological features of PTSD (such as the stress hormone cortisol) did not change. Yet the veterans felt significantly better. They had fewer nightmares, slept better and had fewer clinical symptoms.”
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Ronald Stevens was one of the veterans who cooperated in the investigation. He has had assistance dog Preston for two years now. He didn’t have to wait for the research results to know that Preston has a positive effect on his life. “My dog has made me the father I want to be to my children again,” he says.
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In 2017 Ronald did his last mission for Defense in Afghanistan. Due to the traumatic things he experienced and the colleagues he lost, he contracted PTSD. “Everything was in danger and I had a lot of insomnia, a short fuse, reliving,” he says.
other person
Preston has “completely changed him for the better.” “People notice it in me too. I have really made such big leaps in the past two years. I now dare to walk on the beach and through the woods again, on the road with the children. I didn’t dare to do all that because I was afraid to to shoot in a revival.”
If Ronald is now feeling bad, the dog will feel it and come to comfort him or pull Ronald out of his ‘super focus’ as he calls it. An example: “If I’m walking on the street and I see an uneven road surface, I immediately shoot into a focus, to see if there is a threat in the ground such as roadside bombs, totally irrelevant in the Netherlands of course. Preston feels it when I’m in a focus like that shoots and then he distracts me. Then he pulls on the leash, or otherwise attracts attention, literally pulling me out of that focus.”
‘Daughter can be a child again’
The rest of the family is also taken care of by the dog. “My 9-year-old daughter always sat down with me when I was too much in my head. She then sensed that I was not doing well and wanted to help. Now Preston does that and she can just be my daughter again and I’m daddy again for her.”
Ronald is also committed to the Help Dog Foundation to recruit donors. He hopes that compensation for the assistance dogs will soon change, so that more people can use them.
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For those who will change that in the short term, are people who work or have worked for the police. The research by the Police Academy and Radboud University was a trial, which is now being converted into new policy. This means that the buddy dog is now an official tool for traumatized (former) employees and is also reimbursed.
KNGF Guide Dogs were the only dogs to be supplied to the police during the investigation, ‘but we are going to expand with other parties’, says research leader Bas Smets on behalf of the police.
health insurers
There is therefore no compensation for the other parties to whom KNGF supplies guide dogs. The same applies to the Assistance Dog Foundation. Health insurers in the Netherlands do not want to say at the moment whether there will be changes in the reimbursements from health insurers.
“We want to discuss the results with the National Health Care Institute, which determines entitlement to reimbursements from the Health Insurance Act,” a spokesperson told RTL Nieuws.
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