Person-centered Medicine: advancing methods, promoting implementation

Abstract

In recent years, the World Health Organisation, the World Medical Association, the World Organisation of Family Doctors, the World Psychiatric Association, the International Council of Nurses, the International Alliance of Patients Organisations and the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies of Sciences of the United States of America, along with a wide range of other major professional and patient societies of global clinical importance, have collectively articulated increasing and widespread concern at a deepening crisis within medicine – a crisis of knowledge, compassion, care and costs [1,2]. The common observation is one of a growing distortion in the priorities and ethos of medicine, where a reductive focus on disease processes and organ systems alone has led to the compartmentalisation of knowledge, the fragmentation of services and to documented increases in a frank neglect of patients’ concerns, needs and values [1]. When this phenomenon is considered alongside increasing healthcare resource scarcity in the face of a relentless increase in healthcare costs, together with an exponential rise in the incidence and prevalence of chronic and comorbid disease [3], we arrive at an astonishing picture of the current status of health services in our world today and to a startling realisation of the size and extent of the rapidly growing challenge with which we have now come face to face. Since to do nothing is no longer an option, there are increasing and understandably urgent calls from policymakers across the globe for a response to this dilemma in the form of new approaches to the provision of healthcare services that aim to reverse the de-personalisation in clinical practice and increase its knowledge base, while attempting actively to contain or reduce its rapidly unsustainable costs. This is a challenge of staggering complexity.