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 achieves its purpose is that individual professionals, their teams and the whole organisation learn constantly […]
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 Care in the Community (TICC) project, supported by the EU. By now we have learnt […]
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 and walks of life had begun the intensive programme 10 weeks earlier, […]
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, one in Ireland, the other in Scotland; a hospice in the south-west of England, our […]
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 delighted that an official report by a well-informed and influential commentator puts our model top […]
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, bases its proposals on three objectives: People have choice, […]
“Health – and social care – begins at home. Family first, then community, then the state.” So said Sajid Javid at the Conservative Party conference. It would be easier to enjoy the mirth his statement stimulated if it weren’t that it also sparked even more understandable fury. On the funny side my favourite is the […]
How are work outcomes affected by the treatment of those who do it? I have been exploring this question for ~50 years. In that time, one comment stuck with me more than any other. It was made in 1998 when I interviewed a group of men in Indianapolis who had redesigned most of the US […]
Some say it’s a step forward that the United Kingdom government has finally addressed the challenge of social care funding. Others say the planned tax changes are so regressive as to be unsupportable. Both points are valid, but I say that if there is one conclusion to draw from the week it’s that we need […]
” . . . reform should build on the emerging evidence that community-based approaches can create better care and jobs at lower cost” says Buurtzorg Britain and Ireland’s Brendan Martin in this letter of his, which was recently featured in the Financial Times. It reveals some of Brendan’s thoughts about social care, which illustrate why […]