NEW ISQua White Paper: 

Person-Centred Care Systems: From Theory to Practice

ISQua believes that person-centredness is an important aspect of safe, quality health care. The movement towards person-centred care has been gathering pace over the past two decades, and ISQua has a vibrant community who are invested in making person-centred care a core element in healthcare systems worldwide.

To make Person-Centred Care an expected standard of care, we will need to systematically redesign legislation, organisation, funding, information systems, education, and research.

We assembled a group of patient representatives across four continents and challenged them, as both patients and professionals, to take PCC one step further. The dual goal of this white paper is to contribute to a new understanding of what PCC is and contribute to making PCC a system characteristic of care systems all over the globe.

This ambitious White Paper aims to answer the most difficult question: how do we embed PCC into our systems and how do we make it the expected norm?

Care professionals are "visitors" in the patient's life. The patient is the host, guide, and enabler of the healing journey. The care system's goal is to enable the person to thrive in their life with as little support from health care as possible.

This White Paper expands on a previously published perspective paper by the same authors: Berntsen GR, Yaron S, Chetty M, Canfield C, Ako-Egbe L, Phan P, et al.  Person-centered care (PCC): the people’s perspective. International Journal for Quality in Health Care, Volume 33, Issue Supplement_2, November 2021, Pages ii23–ii26, https://doi.org/10.1093/intqhc/mzab052  

This White Paper has been peer-reviewed by Paul B. Batalden, Janne Lehmann Knudsen, Odet Sarabia and the ISQua Board. We would like to thank them for their contributions.