2.1 Patient-Centered Care
What is patient-centered care?
For many years healthcare focused on diagnoses, disabilities, and deficits rather than the individual. Hospital schedules and routines were based on facility convenience rather than patient comfort. Decision making was centralized, with minimal input from the person receiving care. The services provided were impersonal, and the quality of treatment was defined by regulation and professional standards rather than the individualized care of another human (Texas Health and Human Services, 2024).
Patient-centered care, a term first coined by psychoanalyst Michael Balint in 1968, is an approach to healthcare that focuses on treating patients as individuals with unique needs, preferences, and values. It involves incorporating patients’ perspectives into all aspects of their care, from decision-making to treatment planning and beyond. According to Balint, “The patient, in fact, has to be understood as a unique human-being.”
Patient-centered care is a philosophy now embraced by many hospitals, which places the patient at the center of the healthcare experience. The goal is to improve outcomes, enhance patient satisfaction, and promote a collaborative and supportive relationship between patients and healthcare providers.
All health care settings, from family care and specialty providers, to acute, emergency, and long-term care providers, have the ability to implement patient-centered care. Many institutions have aligned their health care system’s mission, vision, values, leadership, and quality-improvement drivers with patient-centered goals (NEJM Catalyst, 2017), and expect their employees to embrace the same philosophy.
In the patient-centered care model, healthcare workers (from environmental services to surgeons) should consider themselves a partner in the care of their patients. As a partner of care, healthcare workers will treat patients not only from a clinical perspective, but also from an emotional, mental, spiritual, social, and financial perspective. Patient-centered care can take many forms and look very different from employee to employee, but it always places the needs of the individual at the center of every decision.
What will this text teach me about patient-centered care?
The purpose of this text is to examine how different aspects of healthcare contribute to patient-centered care. Important healthcare characteristics such teamwork, communication, conflict resolution, emergency preparedness, equitable patient care, coping with death, and resilience are essential components of patient-centered care.
By the end of this text, the reader should have defined their own mission, vision, and values and identified their personal healthcare philosophy. As the reader works through the text, they will consistently refer to their own healthcare philosophy when learning about patient-centered care concepts.
How do I know patient-centered care is for me?
The patient-centered care philosophy requires the caretaker to place the needs of another human being above their own. There exists a selflessness in this role that is often difficult and can be exhausting. Choosing to work in healthcare can lead to compassion fatigue and burnout if one does not identify their own philosophy and care for themselves along the way.
Identifying a personal philosophy is important to evaluate one’s value system and ethics to ensure patient-centered care is feasible. This work is not for everyone and it is important to determine if your philosophy of healthcare matches the philosophy of patient-centered care embraced by most hospitals today.
Although work in healthcare is difficult and comes with many challenges, all healthcare professions are meaningful and rewarding. No matter what area of healthcare you choose, you will be part of the care of others in your community. Our society depends on the compassion of healthcare and its desire to help those in need.
References
Balint M. (1968). The possibilities of patient-centred medicine. The Brit Journ of Gen Pract. 17(82): 269–276. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0229923
Molina-Mula J, Gallo-Estrada J, Perello´-Campaner C. Impact of Interprofessional Relationships from Nurses’ Perspective on the Decision-Making Capacity of Patients in a Clinical Setting. Int Journ environ research and public health. 2017; 15(1): 49. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph15010049
NEJM Catalyst. (2017). What Is Patient-Centered Care? New England Journal of Medicine.
Texas Health and Human Services. (2024). Comparing Traditional and PersonCentered Models of Care.
World Health Organization. WHO framework on integrated people-centred health Services [Internet]. Geneva: WHO; 2016. http://www.who.int/servicedeliverysafety/areas/people-centred-care/ipchswhat/en/
