![]() Many patients would be willing and indeed eager to do so if their capabilities were recognised, supported and strengthened, instead of being ignored and undermined. 3 Professionals often underestimate the extent to which patients are able to take responsibility for their health. 2 Paternalistic practice styles risk providing inappropriate care that patients would not have wanted if they had been well-informed. Overly directive or paternalistic approaches create dependency and undermine people’s confidence to protect their health, prevent illness and manage their own care. Unfortunately, the way care is delivered sometimes has the opposite effect. Most people want to help themselves, so the health system should be geared to ensuring they acquire the knowledge, skills and confidence to do so. Working in this way means recognising people’s capabilities and potential to manage and improve their own health, not seeing them simply as victims of disease or passive recipients of care. ![]() 1 It is not a medical model and should be regarded as multidisciplinary, recognising that a person may need more than one professional to support them. Person-centred care means treating patients as individuals and as equal partners in the business of healing it is personalised, coordinated and enabling. More importantly, they want to be treated as individuals whose knowledge, values, preferences, family and social circumstances are acknowledged as being of crucial importance when deciding how to manage their medical care. Health information is abundant, patients expect excellent care, and they are much more likely to complain if it falls short of expectations. Patients expected to be told what treatment they were going to be given and it was not the ‘done thing’ to challenge the doctor. ![]() People were grateful recipients of healthcare and the prevailing attitude was that doctors knew best. ![]() When the NHS was founded nearly 70 years ago, people were delighted to receive free care for conditions they may have tolerated for many years because of their inability to pay for medical treatment. It is, therefore, surprising that we have only recently started to question the meaning of person-centred care and how treatment and care programmes could be tailored to meet the individual needs of patients and carers. Hippocrates said ‘it is more important to know what sort of person has a disease than to know what sort of disease a person has’. ![]()
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