to make explicit the importance of team culture for effective patient care. However, initiatives such as this are not enough to continuously develop healthcare contexts that can sustain excellent person‐centred practice.
In Chapter 3 we will introduce the macro healthcare context and this will be further developed in Chapter 17. This is important as we need to consider the qualities of the staff, the specific characteristics of the healthcare setting and the engagement processes we use to develop a person‐centred culture – the kind of culture where leaders facilitate meaningful engagement between team members so that they experience the conditions that enable them to provide person‐centred care to service users (Cardiff et al. 2018; Lynch et al. 2018). Evidence of the relationship between work environments that lack respect for individual personhood (characterised by staff burnout and staff turnover) and poor outcomes for service users is now well established in the literature (Lyndon 2016; Dyrbye et al. 2017), thus highlighting the need for organisations to commit to the continuous development of person‐centred cultures.
Conclusions
In this chapter we have introduced you to some key principles and concepts associated with person‐centredness. We have built on Chapter 1, which explored some of the key philosophical principles and especially the idea of personhood. In Chapter 2 we have illustrated why person‐centredness in healthcare practice needs to take account of individual personhood in the context of ‘all persons’. Person‐centred care is just one part of person‐centred practice and having a practice context that supports and actively enables these ways of practising is critical to success. Very few healthcare settings are either completely person‐centred or not person‐centred as it is a much more dynamic process than that. Person‐centred practice is continuously being developed and so it is rarely helpful to label individuals, teams or specific workplace settings as being person‐centred or not. This dynamic nature of person‐centred practice is also influenced by the workplace culture and how the qualities of the workplace help or hinder the continuous being and doing of person‐centredness – more about this in Chapter 3 and in many chapters in this book.
Summary
Person‐centred practice is underpinned by core values of respect for personhood, authenticity, shared autonomy, respect, mutuality, therapeutic caring and healthfulness.
Person‐centred practice cannot be understood in simplistic terms of ‘caring for a person’ or ‘providing care to a person’ or ‘working therapeutically with a person’, but instead needs to embrace a variety of individual, personal, contextual and political attributes that shape how we provide healthcare.
There are several associated concepts that are similar to person‐centredness. These associated concepts may have some similarities with person‐centredness, as they may share some of the values of personhood, but not all.
There is significant evidence of the relationship between work environments that lack respect for individual personhood (characterised by staff burnout and staff turnover) and poor outcomes for service users and so having a person‐centred culture is critical to practising in a person‐centred way.
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