Transforming home care
A Dutch model of care, transforming home care in Holland, will be a key topic at a major aged care conference to be held in Adelaide in October.
Jos de Blok, known for transforming home care in Holland, is the brainchild behind the Buurtzorg model of care.
Jos de Blok, known for transforming home care in Holland, is the brainchild behind the model of care. He will be the key international speaker at the Leading Age Services Australia (LASA) National Congress in Adelaide.
In seven years, Mr de Blok’s Buurtzorg model of care has grown from one team of four nurses to 8,000 nurses in 700 teams, caring for 60,000 people a year.
Founder and chief executive of home care provider Buurtzorg Holland, Mr de Block’s model is renowned for its high quality and he believes it is a model which can be reproduced in Australia.
In a recent interview, he claims the key to the model is the simplicity. The idea, he explains, is when you keep things simple the individual responsibilities of the practitioner become higher, but so too is their autonomy.
The overall model provides the best possible care with high levels of continuity and significant cost savings.
The cost savings are found from the satisfaction of the intensive and skilled nurses who support their clients to do what they can themselves. Overall, less time is spent nursing.
The model reportedly requires little management. With 8,300 nurses, there is no management hierarchy. With an effective IT system supporting the nurses, Mr de Blok has an overhead cost of about 8%, more than 20% less than his competitors.
External research shows outcomes from the Buurtzorg model have been consistently better than every other home care organisation.
In 2009, Nivel, the Netherlands Institute for Health Services Research, found Buurtzorg had the highest satisfaction rates among patients anywhere in the country. In 2010, Ernst & Young found the average costs per client were 40% less than other home care organisations, indicating a potential national savings.
The Buurtzorg model of care allows:
- Nurses to work all over the country but feel like ‘one’
- Nurses to ask for good examples from colleagues all over the country
- Manager director to easily check the ideas of the teams
- The back office to have an easy way of communication with all the nurses
- Contact between nurses and informal care and other caregivers from the neighbourhood
Find out more about the LASA National Congress 2014.
