Within our healthcare systems, avoidable error rates and medico-legal bills are soaring, care home and hospital scandals are frequent and patient-reported consternation and even frank distress with the inhuman way they are routinely ‘dealt with’ are all now so commonplace as to be almost normative. All of these things - and more - vividly illustrate that much is wrong within modern medicine and healthcare and that much, therefore, needs to be put right. If Society continues to tolerate this crisis of disregard and neglect and if it does not urgently take the time to consider why and how we have arrived at where we currently are - in order to take corrective actions - then we will have reached a very sad point in human history indeed.
It is increasingly claimed that modern medicine has entered into crisis -a crisis of knowledge (uncertainty over what counts as "evidence" for decision-making and what does -glect, iatrogenic injury, malpractice, excess deaths), economic costs (which threaten to bankrupt health systems worldwide) and clinical and institutional governance (a failure of basic and advanced management, inspirational and transformational leadership). We believe such a contention to be essentially correct. In the current article, we ask how the delineated components of the crisis can be individually understood in order to allow them to be collectively addressed. We ask how a transition can be effected away from impersonal, decontextualized and fragmented services in the direction of newer models of service provision that are personalized, contextualized and integrated. How, we ask, can we improve healthcare outcomes while simultaneously containing or lowering their costs? In initial answer to such questions -which are of -come necessary, particularly in the context of the current epidemic of multi-morbid and socially complex long term illness. This new approach, we argue, is represented by the development and application of the concepts and methods of person-centered healthcare (PCH), a philosophy and technique in the care of the sick that enables clinicians and health systems to thereby restoring to medicine the humanism it has lost in over a century of empiricism. But the delivery of a person-centered healthcare within health systems requires a person-centered education and training. In this article we consider, then, why person-centered teaching innovations -ress in the integrity of modern undergraduate medical education. Without such innovations, we do not believe that suitable foundations for subsequent innovations in postgraduate training can 26 A. Miles et al.
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