Beyond patient-centered care: person-centered care for Parkinson’s disease

Abstract

Interest has grown in centering Parkinson’s disease (PD) care provision on the welfare of the patient with PD. By putting the welfare of patients first, this patient-centric focus tends to subordinate the welfare of others including clinicians and carers. A possible solution is person-centered care. Rather than remove the spotlight from the patients, it widens that light to illuminate moral interests of all healthcare participants as persons whose welfare is interdependent. It assumes that unwellness among clinicians, for example, can impact the quality of the PD care they provide, such that caring for clinicians may also optimize the welfare of persons with PD. For PD, we suggest how the two models differ and why these differences are important to understand and act on to optimize benefit for participating stakeholders.