Reconsidering patient-centred care: Authority, expertise and abandonment

Patient-centred care is commonly framed as a means to guard against the problem of medical paternalism, exemplified in historical attitudes of 'doctor knows best'. In this sense, patient-centred care (PCC) is often regarded as a moral imperative. Reviews of its adoption in healthcare settings do not find any consistent improvement in health outcomes; however, these results are generally interpreted as pointing to the need for more or 'better' training for staff, rather than raising more fundamental questions. Patient autonomy is generally foregrounded in conceptualizations of PCC, to be actualized through the exercising of choice and control. But examining healthcare interaction in practice shows that when professionals attempt to enact these underpinnings, it often results in the sidelining of medical expertise that patients want or need. The outcome is that patients can feel abandoned to make decisions they feel unqualified to make, or even that care standards may not be met. This helps to explain why PCC has not produced the hoped-for improvement in health outcomes. It also suggests that, rather than focusing on scoring individual consultations, we need to consider how medical expertise can be rehabilitated for a 21st century public, and how patient expertise can be better incorporated into co-design and co-production of services and resources rather than being seen as something to be expressed through a binary notion of control.Patient and Public ContributionThis viewpoint draws on research conducted by the author across a range of settings in health and social care, all of which incorporated patient and public involvement when it was conducted.