Eden Neighbourhood Care Team

The team works together to provide a holistic service to meet your health and social care needs.

It will take into account individual requirements and work with you, your carers and other people, for example, your GP to provide the best care for you.

The team is self-managing. This means it will make decisions together about how it works with you as a patient and as a team. It is completely responsible for co-ordinating the team and delivering your care.

It has the freedom and flexibility to choose how it works and has a smaller caseload of patients to see.

What are the benefits?

You will be cared for by one small team of people. This will give you and the team time to get to know each other better. You will work together on building your personal care plan. With a smaller caseload, the team will be able to spend more time with you.

Background

We are piloting the Eden Neighbourhood Care Team for 18 months as part of the Transforming Integrated Care in the Community (TICC) project. The TICC project is a four-year social innovation programme, approved and funded by the Interreg 2 Seas Programme and co-funded by the European Development Fund. It aims to apply the principles of Buurtzorg, a Dutch model of care, to the UK.

What is Buurtzorg?

Buurtzorg was founded in the Netherlands in 2006. The literal translation of Buurtzorg is ‘neighbourhood care’. The core principle of Buurtzorg is that the nursing teams are self-managing, which gives them the freedom and flexibility to spend the majority of their time with patients. Buurtzorg teams are small local teams with a maximum of 12 nurses and work with a smaller number of patients than UK community nursing teams.

Buurtzorg nurses aim to spend at least 60 per cent of their time with patients.

They work closely with relatives, carers and local voluntary organisations to ensure good communication and high-quality care.

In the Netherlands, there have been several positive outcomes for Buurtzorg, including improved outcomes for patients, high patient satisfaction, high job satisfaction for the team and savings to the healthcare system.