Designing Smart Network Teams: Supporting Caregivers for People Living at Home

Abstract

This chapter describes the initial conceptual design of Smart Network Teams up to 2014. In a small city in the Netherlands care ecosystem participants (i.e., professional care and welfare organizations, a municipal government, a healthcare insurer, volunteer organizations and churches) initiated a project to support informal caregivers and those they care for. The focal concern was caregivers who were becoming increasingly overloaded and therefore unable to look after their partners at home—resulting in a high flow of people to health care institutions. This carried with it both increased human distress (for the informal caregivers and those they were caring for) and economic cost as a result of increased institutionalization. Fragmentation and unnecessary complexity were seen as creating a situation in which neither the identification nor the support of informal caregivers was receiving much attention. To address this issue and to enable simple, effective and efficient coordination among ecosystem actors, a customized version of STS Design was used to co-create a joint vision and co-design smart networks of self-managing teams to reduce complexity and provide caregivers with higher control capabilities. Smart networks were seen as having the potential to contribute to higher care integration enabling a better quality of working life for caregivers, care recipients and care professionals; care that is better tailored to the patient need; cost reduction; better multidisciplinary and inter-organizational cooperation; citizens becoming more responsible and; neighborhoods becoming more active. Deep involvement of all actors, guidance on STS design, letting go of views on own tasks, mutual relations and behavior were identified as key success factors.