Introduction

The foundation of patient-centered care is the patient-professional relationship. By exploring both the disease and patients' unique experience of illness, healthcare professionals take into consideration their individual needs as well as their emotional and physical concerns.

Using narratives to describe experiences of patients and professionals, this book reveals the four interactive components of the patient-centered clinical method: exploring health, disease and illness; understanding the whole person; finding common ground; and enhancing the patient-doctor relationship.

The concluding chapters illustrate ways in which all four components interact with and complement each other and can be used in unison to the immeasurable benefit of both patient and professional. The stimulating narratives are all based on recent developments in the theoretical model of patient-centred clinical care.

This wide-ranging, thought-provoking text is highly relevant to a wide range of healthcare professionals as well as medical educators and healthcare students. For physicians, narratives provide insight and illumination of what it truly means to be patient-centered. They also help clinicians to examine, in a reflective manner, what it means to be a healer.