Centeredness in Healthcare: A Concept Synthesis of Family-centered Care, Person-centered Care and Child-centered Care

Background: Increasingly within healthcare, different kind of 'centeredness' are used to denote the focus of care which can create confusion for practitioners. Methods: A concept analysis was undertaken to identify the antecedents, attributes and relationship between family-, person-, and child-centered care. PubMed and CINAHL were searched from 2012 to 2017 and thirtyfive papers were reviewed. Results: Both person- and child-centered care are focused on individuals, a symmetric relationship and the tailoring of care to individual needs while family-centered care is focused on the family as a unit of which the child is included. Person-centered care focuses on an adult person with autonomy, while the focus in child-centered care is the individual child as an own actor with rights but still close to a family. Conclusion: It appears at a conceptual level that the concepts of centeredness contain both similarities and differences. Finding ways to structure nursing and focus the care that respects a person's dignity and humanity is essential in healthcare and should be a major goal of health policy and health systems worldwide. (c) 2018 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.