In this webinar we were joined by Brendan Martin, the founder of social enterprise, Public World, and Buurtzorg lead in Britain & Ireland. The social enterprise Buurtzorg has provided nursing and care in the Netherlands for 12 years, growing from one self-managed team of four nurses to around 1,000 teams and 10,000 nurses today. It currently provides more than half of the district nursing care in the Netherlands – without the need for managers.
Buurtzorg means ‘neighbourhood care’ and works by enabling and supporting the professional autonomy of its staff, who in turn focus on supporting clients to live the lives they choose at home for as long as possible.
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More information and resources from the webinar
Buurtzorg’s mantra of “coffee then care” speaks to the importance of connecting people with their neighbourhoods and communities, a common theme in much of transformation work in our current system.
Brendan Martin, who first brought this approach to the UK in partnership with Buurtzorg founder Jos de Blok in 2015, shares what he has learned from working with around 30 NHS, local government and charitable organisations since then, and the vision for continued collaboration in the future.
The Buurtzorg model – which has only 50 back-office admin staff – is so unusual that Cambridge University business academic Mark Thompson, writing in the Guardian, commented when he first heard about Buurtzorg that it “made me fall off my seat”. He made a back-of-the-envelope calculation that such a self-managed approach could save £35.5bn across Britain’s public sector, freeing up thousands of staff to return to valuable frontline work.
Impact reports from Buurtzorg projects
Guy’s and St Thomas’s
Tower Hamlets
West Suffolk
This webinar was organised by the Q Community’s Reimagining Health and Care Special Interest Group and is the first in a series of upcoming webinars.
See what else the group has planned:
13:00 – 14:00, 14 February 2020 – ‘Redesigning public services to put relationships at their heart’ – with Katie Rose
13:00 – 14.00, 22 April 2020 – Neighbourhood Midwives: The model that boosted continuity of care by 500%
13:15 – 14:15, 21 May 2020 – We know New Public Management fails but what else can we do? – with Toby Lowe and Gary Wallace