New Ways of Working in Healthcare (& The Pub)

I thought the New Ways of Working newsletter was done for 2022 but I was down the pub on Friday with a couple of pals and this one came to me... I was in the not so new King’s Head, Bristol (est. 1660, pictured below) with Louis and Simon. Louis works for a techie company and Simon is a dietitian for the NHS. ‘Agile’ cropped up in conversation and Simon asked What’s Agile? In the absence of Post-its we did our best to explain it with beer mats and pint pots for props! Atlassian do it better though, they describe Agile as:

an iterative approach to project management and software development that helps teams deliver value to their customers faster and with fewer headaches. Instead of betting everything on a "big bang" launch, an agile team delivers work in small, but consumable, increments. Requirements, plans, and results are evaluated continuously so teams have a natural mechanism for responding to change quickly.

Having suffered PRINCE2 training, Simon quite liked the sound of this. Is Agile a good fit for a dietitian's work, however? We weren’t so sure… Agile ways of working were designed for software and product development and New Ways of Working borrows from them quite a lot because, in the right context, they’re great! The beauty of New Ways of Working is that they’re not sector specific. Think of any sector and there will be organisations experimenting with healthier meetings, participatory decisions, a culture of feedback, and psychological safety etc etc. New Ways of Working are helpful wherever you work.

And so the idea that came to me in the pub… to curate and share some resources on the standout case study in healthcare in the hope that Simon and others in the health sector might be encouraged not to copy Buurtzorg, but to try New Ways of Working 🤞 Here they are:

📖 Reading

• Buurtzorg's Healthcare Revolution: 14,000 Employees, 0 Managers, Sky-High Engagement | Corporate Rebels (7 mins)

• ‘Buurtzorg’. The Dutch word that could revolutionize healthcare | World Economic Forum (3 mins)

• Buurtzorg: the Dutch model of neighbourhood care that is going global | The Guardian (4 mins)

• Can the Buurtzorg Model of nursing transform the NHS? | Independent Nurse (5 mins)

👂 Listening

• Buurtzorg and the power of self-managed teams of nurses | Leadermorphosis (40 mins)

  Buurtzorg is a remarkable organisation: 15,000 employees working in 850 self-managed teams to deliver home care to patients in the Netherlands. The results, including both patient and employee satisfaction, are so outstanding that Buurtzorg-inspired models are popping up all over the world. I got the chance to talk to three nurses from Team Houten.

• Jos de Blok on Buurtzorg | Leadermorphosis (57 mins)

  Jos de Blok is the founder of Buurtzorg, a home care organisation in the Netherlands with 15,000 nurses and no managers. We talk about how their decentralised, human approach has helped them, why he believes ‘protocolising things’ in organisations does damage, and his advice for leaders and traditional top-down organisations that are embarking on transformation processes.

• Helen Sanderson on reinventing home care | Leadermorphosis (45 mins)

  Helen Sanderson is a leader of several social enterprises specialising in “person-centred care.” She shares her story of stepping back as CEO of her company HSA to create a self-managing team and all the leadership and culture challenges they encountered along the way.

📺 Watching

• How Buurtzorg Works | Corporate Rebels (5 mins)

  Learn about the unique way of working of Buurtzorg - the Dutch home care nursing provider. This video animation explains the basics of Buurtzorg and its network of self-managing teams.

• Organisation without management | Jos de Blok (25 mins)

  Jos de Blok is the founder of Dutch organisation Buurtzorg, where autonomous teams of nurses work directly with their patients, in a community-based network, free from management structure and unnecessary administrative burdens.

Please do share this with any friends or family that work in healthcare 🙏 And if they like the sound of New Ways of Working they might like to explore the New Ways of Working Playbook. Cheers 🍻