Practitioners around the world are being increasingly encouraged to work in a person-centred way, but what does this really mean, and to what extent is it possible? Taking the UK's National Health Service (NHS) as a primary example, this article begins by investigating what it means in practice to be person-centred in the NHS, examines two NHS roles that encourage person-centred working and reflects on the author's own experience in an NHS setting. The author's aim is to understand and outline what is meant by person-centred in a modern healthcare context and explore potential consequences of such a definition. This article finds that the term 'person-centred' has been distorted over the last 20 years to have a new meaning, one that is difficult to consistently define. Often, practitioners have been encouraged to work in a way that degrades Rogerian person-centred principles. Investigations into being person-centred in the NHS reveal that practitioners are often hampered by the constraints of such a large systemic organisation, which creates an environment that can be challenging to person-centred working.
Ben Titheridge (Fri,) studied this question.