The Essence of Person-Centred Care in Contemporary Nursing & Midwifery

This essay provides an overview of person-centred care within nursing and midwifery, emphasizing its importance in various healthcare settings. It defines person-centred care as an approach that integrates person-centeredness and personhood into the care provided, highlighting the significance of trust, respect, and individual attention to meet holistic needs. The essay discusses the benefits of this approach, including increased patient and family satisfaction, and the development of therapeutic relationships. It also addresses potential barriers to implementing person-centred care, such as time constraints, a focus on tasks rather than individuals, and environmental factors. The importance of creating a supportive physical environment that preserves patient dignity and fosters autonomy for nurses is also discussed.

Running head: PERSON CENTRED CARE
PERSON CENTRED CARE
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Chapter 1: Introduction to nursing, midwifery and person-centred care
Person-centred care is seen to take place when the concepts of person-centeredness
and personhood are incorporated in the actual care that is provided to the service users
throughout their life spans in varieties of settings. Person centred care is based on trust and
respect and are considered to be extremely important in different setting of care services
ranging from mental healthcare to that of aged care services, maternity care and community
based services. It responds to the individuality of every person to ensure meeting all the
holistic needs of the persons. However, person-centred care is found to move far beyond
recognition of the individuality of the service users and include unique healthcare needs of
the persons. Such care comprises of valuing the beliefs and principles of the person and this
aspect needs the nurses to know about the person, their story as well as the needs that relate
to the whole being and not only to the factors that the patient has presented to the healthcare
environment.
This form of care celebrates the spirit of partnership as well as social justice. It has
been found that developing partnership can be achieved through sharing of power by
acceptance of the rights of people, encouraging them to participate in decision-making and
acknowledging their autonomy. This helps the patients in feeling empowered for making
their own decisions about their own care and taking responsibility of those decisions. Care
procedures that promote holistic person-centred approach result in increased satisfaction
among the patients and their family members. Therefore, nursing professionals need to
internalise the principles and attributes of person-centred care for permeating all endeavours
in healthcare.
However, a number of barriers can impede the successful establishment of person-
centred care. Many of the experts are found to state that this procedure is not only highly

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individualistic but is also time consuming. Again, it is argued that when professionals focus
only on tasks or serve patients as cases, they fail in optimising opportunities for promoting
person-centred care and in place values the system rather than the service user. This makes
the care procedure much robotic where the professionals become disengaged and
disconnected. Therefore, when professionals would become enthusiastic to implement
principles of person-centred care, chances of developing therapeutic relationship increase
along with increase of patient satisfaction. Many opine that another barrier to person-centred
care is that its principles is optimistic and idealistic and also difficult to be achieved because
of various competing priorities and pressures with the environment being one barrier. The
physical environment ensure effective preservation of the of the privacy and dignity of the
patients so that their sense of self is not threatened. This environment should also try to
maintain a culture, which would be conducive of the working in the person centred ways, and
even services need to be flexible, supportive and easy for the users to navigate. Nurses should
be able to experience freedom and act autonomously. The environment should be able to
recognise organisational and decision-making systems so that innovation and power
differences can be tackled successfully.