Articles
What is Patient-centred care? (3)
- August 30, 2021
- Posted by: mghalandari
- Category: Definition Digital health
Person-Centered and People-Centered Care
Person centred care is about care approaches and practices that see the person as a whole with many levels of needs and goals with these needs coming from their own personal social determinants of health. Hence, to be ‘person-centred’ means being responsive to holistic needs and so tailor care to individuals’ or group’s specific characteristics and potential.
People centred care goes beyond a model or care that confronts common epidemiological population profiles to one that considers holistic needs and aims of the community in an evolutionary movement that should strengthens individuals and communities’ competencies and action towards health and well-being. People centred care also encompasses person-centred care.
Key principles of People centred care
- Promotion of health and wellbeing
- Focus on whole-person care
- Care for all people
- Partnership and participation
- Sensitivity to social/cultural diversity and context
- Quality of relationship and communication between the system and users
- Tailored and responsive care – i.e. to individual needs
- Comprehensive
- Continuous
- Right and responsibilities
People centred care as encompassing the following five dimensions:
1) a biopsychosocial perspective, broadening the scope of medicine from organic diseases to a far wider range of dysfunctional states, and referring to the very useful distinction between disease and illness;
2) the patient-as-person, i.e., as an experiencing individual rather than the object of some disease entity, and emphasizing the unique identity of every patient;
3) sharing power and responsibility, with a greater patient involvement in care than is generally associated with the biomedical model;
4) a therapeutic alliance between patient and health worker as a fundamental requirement rather than a useful addition; and
5) the doctor-as-person, meaning that patient-centered medicine is a ‘two-person medicine’ whereby the doctor is an integral part of the process and indicating that doctors are not purely interchangeable.
Depending on the context, authors use the term ‘patient’ interchangeably with terms like person, people, client, resident, etc. We note an increasing popularity of the terms ‘person- and people-centered care’, emphasizing that individuals are (to be) active partners in their care process and not the mere passive and obedient recipients of care prescribed by knowledgeable and powerful health workers. We fully subscribe to the value of these considerations but nevertheless believe that the term ‘patient-centered care’ is more suitable to the focus of this paper: i.e., factors influencing providers in the interaction with a care-seeking individual – whether that interaction is for curative, preventive, or promotional care. Moreover, the term ‘patient’ is still quite commonly used and understood by health providers and the general public.