About Buurtzorg
Buurtzorg is a pioneering healthcare organisation established 12 years ago in the Netherlands. It started with one team of four nurses and now has 950 teams and 10,000 nurses and nurse assistants providing more than half of Dutch home care.
At its heart is a nurse-led model of holistic care provided by self-managed neighbourhood teams – Buurtzorg is Dutch for Neighbourhood Care.
Teams are supported by regional coaches, an IT system that works because nurses were involved in designing it, and back office support designed around and dedicated to their needs.
The model has revolutionised health and social care in the Netherlands. Patient satisfaction rates are the highest of any healthcare organisation, impressive financial savings have been made and employee satisfaction is high.
Teams are self-managed, having professional freedom to decide how they organise the work, share responsibilities and make decisions with a simple and clear operational framework agreed with their organisation.
Not only has Buurtzorg grown as an organisation, it has also supported change in other health and social care providers, influenced major changes in the insurance and regulatory environments and extended its model into home care, mental health care and maternity and youth services.
The Buurtzorg group now employs more than 14,000 people and – in response to demand from all over the world – now supports change in a growing number of countries, including Britain and Ireland.
Buurtzorg in Britain and Ireland
Although the health and social care systems differ from the Netherlands, the challenges in the UK and Ireland are remarkably similar to those Buurtzorg was founded to overcome: ever increasing demand, spiralling costs, fragmented care models, inadequate outcomes and disillusioned staff teams.
We work with our clients to find solutions that work for them, and we have learnt from doing this in Britain since 2015 what works and what doesn’t.
We provide access to the experience of over 14,000 nurses and care givers in the Netherlands and to the Buurtzorg leaders, back office specialists and coaches who have proven expertise in the organisational changes required to support self-managed frontline teams.
Take a look at what we do
A global beacon: could Buurtzorg work in the UK?
In the September issue of Care Management Matters magazine our very own Brendan Martin shares what’s behind the success of the Dutch care model Buurtzorg and explains what Britain can learn from the initiative. Amid all the doom & gloom about the state of health...
A blueprint for successful transfer of the Buurtzorg model?
In the first of this series of blogs, Brendan Martin explained that Buurtzorg’s purpose is to support people to live their lives with meaning and autonomy, based on the belief that we all want to maximise our quality of life and control over it but are also...
Home-based care: implementing a new organizational model placing humanity at the heart
After intense years of implementation, data collection, analyses and reporting, Transforming Integrated Care in the Community (TICC) project has come to an end. In other words, the most important phase has started. Disseminate, share findings and knowledge gained in...
Looking back on ’22, forward to ’23 & sending festive greetings to all!
It’s been another busy and productive year for Buurtzorg Britain & Ireland as we’ve begun work within the hospice movement, reablement services and hospitals, as well as continuing our projects in NHS community nursing, social care and social housing. Read our...
Complex work needs simple support
In my last blog, I explored Buurtzorg’s purpose, stressing that its service helps people draw on and contribute to their own and their community’s assets, complementing them as necessary with professional inputs. Among the many striking features of how Buurtzorg...
Buurtzorg means ‘neighbourhood care’. But what does that mean?
Over the past seven years Public World (now trading also as Buurtzorg Britain & Ireland) has introduced scores of organisations and hundreds of nurses and other professionals to the Buurtzorg way of working. We’ve also been a partner in the Transforming Integrated...
Solving the workforce crisis requires a new social care vision
A couple of weeks ago I was honoured to speak at a ceremony arranged by the Thistle Foundation in Edinburgh at which certificates were awarded to the first cohort of graduates from the charity’s innovative new Academy. Nine women and men from all sorts of backgrounds...
Let’s make neighbourhoods integrated care systems – without the capital letters
We are delighted to be helping an increasingly diverse range of public service organisations to introduce self-managed team work. In April alone, we worked with: two charities supporting people to live well at home with long-term conditions and learning disabilities,...
Don’t drive Buurtzorg: change at the speed of trust
Did I uncork the champagne on reading Camilla Cavendish’s proposal, in her independent report published last month, that the Buurtzorg model should be “driven out” in adult social care? Surely, as founder and managing director of Buurtzorg Britain & Ireland, I am...
Reflections, hopes & above all, festive greetings to you all!
As the year draws to a close we find ourselves reflecting on the last 12 months, as we did last December, with mixed emotions. We know that work continues to fight COVID, to ramp up the vaccination programme and to address the huge treatment backlog that's grown...
Can you commission friendship?
This year I took part in the 2021 Caring Places Festival, hosted by Buurtzorg Britain and Ireland. The day explored what a caring place can look like, and specifically what the health and care system’s role is in creating caring places. It is already becoming a cliché...
‘People at the heart of care’: how Buurtzorg does it
The UK government yesterday published its “ambitious 10-year vision for how we will transform support and care in England”. We are glad that it presents the Buurtzorg way as an example of how that vision can be realised. The White Paper, People at the Heart of Care,...
Latest Tweet
Hi Lesley, so good to see you @buurtzorg @communitycare professional in Australia with our @BuurtzorgAU @sdyckerhoff colleagues https://t.co/0oBYvLxdg9
— Gertje van Roessel (@groessel) September 21, 2018
