Have we forgotten the moral justification for patient-centred care?
Patient-centred care has attracted intense attention over the last 50 years. First articulated in the late 1960s, and inspired by Roger’s Client-Centred Therapy and Balint’s concept of the therapeutic relationship, its early focus was on the relationship between a patient and their physician. Over the last couple of decades, patient-centred care has become a foundation for health professional education, a guiding principle for health disciplines and an explicit focus of the patient-centred medical home. Perhaps the debates about frameworks, definitions and terminology have distracted us. Is it time for educators, researchers and clinicians to move their focus beyond the technical aspects of patient-centred care to re-discover its moral justification?