Patient-centred care - principles of patient-centred care

Principles

Patient-centred care is built on core principles - respecting patient values and preferences, ensuring genuine shared decision-making, providing information the patient can actually understand and use, coordinating care around the patient's needs rather than provider convenience, and attending to the patient's emotional and psychosocial needs alongside their physical condition
An increasingly emphasised care model across healthcare systems, contrasting with a traditionally more paternalistic, disease-centred model of clinical decision-making

Genuine shared decision-making (rather than simply informing the patient of a clinician-determined plan) requires actively eliciting patient values and preferences before finalising a care plan, recognising that the "medically optimal" option by objective clinical criteria alone may not align with what matters most to that specific patient given their own priorities, risk tolerance, and life circumstances

Structured shared decision-making tools/frameworks can support genuinely collaborative treatment planning, particularly for decisions where reasonable patients might weigh trade-offs differently based on personal values (e.g. treatment intensity decisions with competing risk-benefit profiles)

Explicitly eliciting and incorporating patient values/preferences into care planning, rather than presenting a single predetermined plan for the patient to simply accept or decline
Providing information in a format and level of detail the specific patient can genuinely understand and use for decision-making, adapted to their health literacy and communication needs

Shared decision-making tools and frameworks, health literacy-adapted information provision, contrast with traditional paternalistic decision-making models, values-based treatment intensity decisions

Genuine patient-centred care requires actively eliciting a patient's values and preferences before finalising a care plan, not simply presenting a clinician-determined "best" option for acceptance - the objectively optimal choice by clinical criteria alone may not align with what actually matters most to that specific patient, given their own priorities and life circumstances

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