Buurtzorg

  • Health care - Netherlands - 9,000 employees - Nonprofit
  • A vast organization run almost entirely with small, independent teams

Within Buurtzorg (which means "neighborhood care" in Dutch), nurses work in teams of 10 to 12, with each team serving around 50 patients in a small, well-defined neighborhood. The team is in charge of all the tasks that were previously fragmented across different departments. They are responsible not only for providing care, but for deciding how many and which patients to serve. They do the intake, the planning, the vacation and holiday scheduling, and the administration. They decide where to rent an office and how to decorate it. They determine how best to integrate with the local community, which doctors and pharmacies to reach out to, and how to best work with local hospitals. They decide when they meet and how they will distribute tasks among themselves, and they make up their individual and team training plans. They decide if they need to expand the team or split it in two if there are more patients than they can keep up with, and they monitor their own performance and decide on corrective action if productivity drops. There is no leader within the team; important decisions are made collectively.[11]