Date started: September 2017
Website: www.wellbeingteams.org
Twitter: @wellbeingteams
Location: UK-wide

In four UK local authorities, small, neighbourhood teams are transforming the homecare model. By knowing both the community and the people they support, Wellbeing Teams replaces traditional care hierarchies with trusting relationships more responsive to the individual’s needs.

Founder and CEO Helen Sanderson has reinvented Buurtzorg’s innovative homecare model for the UK. Self-management is at the core of the ethos, where the client is active in sustaining their own quality of life. Carers with a can-do attitude support them to connect with beneficial community groups and activities.

More radical still is their commitment to value-based recruitment, reaching people who directly align with the company’s value of compassion. Innovative recruitment workshops, an informal contract of ‘ten promises’ and referral cards for prospective employees, has resulted in 80 per cent recruitment from outside the care sector.

Wellbeing Teams was named Best Recruitment Initiative at the Skills for Care Awards and has partnered with Community Circles, a charity delivering ‘circles of support’, which will allow the model to expand at scale across the UK to support anybody within the community to live well at home.