Sunday, September 21, 2014

Buurtzorg - Community Nursing

Buurtzorg is a community nursing organization in the Netherlands. It started small, focused on the needs of the professional care team and the people they support. It uses a self-organizing model that puts the local team in charge of the care and how they run the team to provide that care.

A trio of remarkable outcomes resulted from this.

  1. Extremely satisfied patients with excellent outcomes and reduced total costs (40% below the expected cost). 
  2. Extremely satisfied workers. Buurtzorg was the Employer of the Year in 2011 and 2012 in the Netherlands.
  3. Explosive growth, from the first team of 4 nurses in 2006 to 8,000 in 2014. Buurtzorg now provides 80% of the community nursing services in the Netherlands. This has occurred with almost no corporate overhead (a central staff of 45 and 15 team coaches).
The shared services include
  • An electronic health record
  • A social network
  • A team dashboard
There are references to some outsourced services, such as payroll and legal. I'd like to know more.

Here are links about Buurtzorg.



The Queen's Nursing Institute (2014 blogs):




I came across Buurtzorg in a book on a new organizational paradigm (Reinventing Organizations by Frederic Laloux). A great book that needs its own entry... something for another day.

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