7 Reasons to Offer Person-Centered Care

At CareScout, we see person-centered care as foundational to reimagining long-term care. In person-centered care, the older adult has a say in their care. They have a voice. Their goals, preferences, and values are incorporated into their treatment. They are seen as complex individuals who have led rich and amazing lives.

In other words, person-centered care can help change the way our society views older adults and the aging journey. That in itself should be reason enough to offer person-centered care. In fact there are many reasons why creating and nurturing a person-centered care climate can benefit your organization as well. Here are some examples.

Person-centered care is gaining momentum in long-term care, among both care seekers and caregivers. In one recent nursing home study, for example, both families and caregivers agreed on the need to focus on person-centered care, including finding ways for new staff to quickly learn residents’ preferences so staff could consistently provide the type of care they wanted to deliver.¹ 

Compared to care that focuses mainly on illness or health conditions, person-centered care has proven to offer more complete, more effective care that results in improved outcomes and higher patient and provider satisfaction.

Person-centered care can help keep care recipients more engaged in their care. Increased engagement has been associated with a marked decrease in re-hospitalization rates as well as greater confidence in self-management and greater knowledge about warning signs indicating a worsening health condition.² These factors may directly or indirectly contribute to reducing excess costs of care.

A caregiving culture that encourages staff to be more person-centered in their profession, where they know their clients deeply and honor their uniqueness, can help improve job satisfaction. (See "Can Person-Centered Care Address Staff Turnover?")

Long-term care providers who pass our credentialing process are invited to join the CareScout Quality Network and have the opportunity to become designated as preferred providers. Not only can this raise providers’ visibility to discharge planners and engaged care seekers, it can make those providers more attractive to these referral sources. (See "Why Long-term Care Needs a Quality, Person-Centered Care Network")

The CareScout Quality Network is the first network engaging with long-term care providers to foster and measure person-centered care. However, the Center for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) has begun to promote person-centered care, through the CMS Innovation Center.³ 

The Center is incorporating patient and caregiver perspectives across its models, implementing more patient-reported outcome measures (PROMs) to measure what matters to care recipients, and evaluating care recipient and caregiver experience in its models.⁴

Long-term care needs to change if we are to meet the needs of the growing number of people who are growing older and living longer. Many of those older adults have said they want to age in place as long as possible, do it on their terms, and continue to live meaningful lives.  

Their caregivers, who we need to retain if we are to deliver quality care on a wider scale, have said they want their work to be meaningful, too. We should listen.