Person-centredness: A concept analysis

Abstract

Person-centred care is a term that has been used frequently in literature since the mid-1990s. This type of care requires health care staff to use person-centredness as a focus for developing relationships and plans of care. In an attempt to define person-centredness, a literature review was undertaken as a means of developing a concept analysis. This led to profiling attributes of person-centredness developed from the work of early theorists and authors as they began to recognise the importance of the ethical and legal rights of people and the importance of holistic care in maintaining wellbeing. However, in the literature, the term person-centred was often interchanged with terms such as patient or client-centred which may lead to confusion. This concept analysis shows that many of the attributes of person-centredness are indeed relevant to patient and client centred care. However, the connotations behind client and patient may appear to shift the balance of power to the health carer by concentrating on the illness rather than the person. Therefore, clarification of the term person-centredness may assist future researchers, practitioners and authors to apply one term only until evolution leads to further definition or change.

Person Centered Care and Personalized Medicine: Irreconcilable Opposites or Potential Companions?

“…This subsequent analysis presented some challenges, as PCC and PM are vague concepts [5,9,18,23,40,41], creating difficulties to determine which ideas in the literature are truly central to either concept and which merely relate to some practical implementation thought (rightly or wrongly) to exemplify PCC or PM. At the same time, a few central themes of the respective notions, sometimes presented separately from one another or expressed differently by different authors, appeared in the material.…”

“…At the same time, a few central themes of the respective notions, sometimes presented separately from one another or expressed differently by different authors, appeared in the material. Among the ideas extracted from the PCC literature, for instance, were the following three: recognizing and meeting the person's complex needs [10,23,25,27,34,41,43,45], valuing the person [25,26,[29][30][31]41], and treating persons as individuals [10,25,28,34,36,41]. We took such underlying themes to express the core meaning, tightly linked to ethical stances, of the respective notions.…”

“…The base of PCC is about the complexity of the patient (including interpersonal connections and dependencies) and the variability between people, recognizing the person or the individual behind ''the patient'' [8,10,25,26,28,34,36,41], valuing this person [25,26,30,31,41], and respecting her dignity [36] and rights [28,30]. The interaction between the healthcare professional and the person receiving the care happening at the action level consists of getting to know the patient through her personal narrative [10, 18, 24, 26, 28, 30-32, 36, 37, 42, 43], and collaborating through shared decision making [24,30,36] within the framework of a continuous partnership in care [6,7,27,32,34,45].…”

“…The relationship between person and carer is one of individuality and sharing where the carer recognizes pathways of care but designs them for the individual [41].…”

“…On the PCC side, the first level is rather about a shift of power [34,41], which takes place through the reference to 'persons' rather than 'patients' and the mentioned assumed values linked to that [7,41]:…”