The other companies are also shortstaffed, all healthcare is at the moment, and the bureaucracy layers just keeps humming along ... Buurtzorg is however cheaper, and since you cannot scale the actual care that counts.

Yes, and the actual nurses also have more job satisfaction and their patients are happier too, so the quality also improves. The main explanation given for that is that compared to solutions that require a lot of time spent on administrative work, these nurses get to focus on the actual care work, and have more personal time with the patients, meaning a bond of trust can be established. Which is also an important aspect in the scaling trade-off I'd say.

Imagine if we had an openly adoptable Buurtzorg model along side open source software used for adminstration. With the power resting with the carers the non-care admin work could be collectively automated through the open source model.

I'm actually working on the software part of that, in the UK. It isn't open source yet (mostly because we can't afford the level of comfort we need about data security, given that this is very sensitive data) but that remains the intention.

But even with open-source software, there will still be the issue of how highly regulated the care industry is. There are significant variations even within the UK, and indeed, there are even inconsistencies between inspectors of the same regulator.

But below the level at which regulation kicks in, care work is—for some people—the most rewarding (not financially!) type of work and arguably will be one of the last professions to be replaced by AI (though there is plenty of work on robots).