Health care concept is increasingly moving away from medical, task oriented and professional driven model towards a holistic model of health care which values the needs of the persons and centred on the needs of the patients. This shift is described as person centred care. Despite the wide availability of literature, philosophy and evidence on the outcomes of the person centred care, barely it is an ideal in reality. This present article throws light on the philosophy and challenges of person centred care and tries to raise the awareness and understanding about person centred care for people with dementia and explores on the challenges underpinning person-centred care in dementia.Person centred care means, being “respectful of and responsive to individual patient preferences, needs, and values and ensuring that patient values guide all clinical decisions”. Each individual has unique history, personality, values, right to dignity, respect and right to participation. PCC framework emp...

The need to improve care for people living with dementia in the hospital setting has long been recognised. Person-centred care has the potential to improve the experience of care for persons living with dementia and their carers, and has been shown to improve the experiences of hospital staff caring for the persons living with dementia, however it remains challenging to deliver in a time- and task-focussed acute care setting. This commentary suggests that to embed person-centred care across the hospital environment, cultural changes are needed at organisational and ward levels. In particular there needs to be: leadership that supports and advocates for workforce capacity to recognise and meet both psychological and physical needs of people living with dementia, promotion of physical environments that support familiarisation and social interactions, an inclusive approach to carers and the development of a culture of sharing knowledge and information across hierarchies and roles. An e...

Addressing criticisms of the routine-driven, task-oriented, depersonalising nature of conventional services, and reflecting a broader trend across health and social care, person-centered care has become the watchword for quality in long-term care for older people in recent years. Person-centered care requires recognizing the unique personhood of each individual regardless of their physical or mental capacity. Efforts to realize this approach depend largely on the non-professional nursing staff who deliver the majority of direct care in this context. However, little is known about how new knowledge, including ideas and evidence about person-centered care, translates into the daily practices of this cadre of staff, who have little formal training, low job status, and limited access to traditional forms of research dissemination and knowledge exchange. Building on the existing knowledge-translation literature, therefore, the aim of this study was to explore the mechanisms of knowledge translation about person-centered care among care assistants in long-term care. The objectives were to examine how these staff develop their understanding of person-centered care; identify the personal and contextual factors involved; and explore what can be learned about person-centered care from their current practices. The study used ethnographic methods, including 500 hours of participant observation, in-depth interviews, and document analysis, to conduct case studies of two private nursing homes located in the East Midlands and the north-eastern United States. Without claiming to demonstrate causality, extending the research across two policy settings did facilitate the identification of pertinent issues within and beyond each individual facility. Data analysis was informed by practice theory, which provided an alternative to the individualist assumptions which characterize popular representations of long-term care, on the one hand, and, on the other, structural explanations that renounce individual agency altogether. From this theoretical perspective, drawing in particular on Bourdieu‘s theory of practical logic and the neo-institutional concept of institutional logics, this study identified how the interconnection of particular practices within each setting produced different situated understandings and implementation of person-centered care. A key finding was that care assistants‘ individualized knowledge about each resident, obtained through their direct daily care, represented an important form of symbolic capital in this field. Their willingness or reluctance to share such knowledge, consequently, corresponded to the extent to which other practices, including communication and teamwork, supported or threatened this limited source of power. The second, related finding was that care assistants derived from this individualized knowledge a certain amount of autonomy, or discretion, over the organization and delivery of daily care. This discretion, together with the agency that care assistants exercised in navigating different institutional logics in this context of care – which was the third main finding – signified a potential nexus of practice change. Conversely, new knowledge or ideas that undermined this limited discretion and agency tended to engender denial or resistance. As the population ages, demand for long-term care for older people is increasing exponentially, prompting concerns about the capacity and sustainability of this sector. One significant area of concern is workforce recruitment, retention, and competence. This study, located at the intersection of research on long-term care and knowledge translation, contributes to efforts to address these concerns by identifying opportunities for intervention in education, training, and support, in order to build a workforce that is equipped to provide high-quality, evidence-based, person-centered care for older people throughout the years ahead.

To study person centred care for people with a dementia with a particular focus on residential aged care facilities - A 2013 Churchill Fellowship Report.