General Prevention Research and Person Centered Medicine

Abstract

In recent years, prevention research has increasingly focused more on dissemination, implementation and deployment, and less on evidence acquisition on the efficacy of proposed interventions. The reasons for this seem to be that while there is a large body of evidence already available on the efficacy of preventive interventions, there is a pressing need to convert them into a tangible reality and yield benefits. In order to achieve a practical adoption of the most useful of these intervention, frameworks of evaluation and deployment have been devised. Such processes filter out those interventions that – even though theoretically efficacious – don’t prove pragmatically effective, or those which cannot be deployed. As preventive interventions often need a lengthy evaluation timeframe and their evaluation rarely pertains to a single outcome, only few and relatively specific interventions are chosen. This situation becomes even more challenging with person-centred interventions due to their hard-to-assess polymorphic, humanistic and other collateral benefits. Here we discuss the challenges posed through this evidence-based approach to person-centred prevention research, but we will also welcome the opportunity to use this as a means to develop robust ways of demonstrating the effectiveness of person-centred interventions.