Appraising the International College of Person Centered Medicine's Ten Years Promoting Healthy Lives and Well-Being for All

Abstract

The International College of Person-centered Medicine (ICPCM) developed from a network of persons who shared the willingness and determination to contribute to the promotion of health and wellbeing through the person-centered perspective. This approach places the person as the center of health and the goal of health actions. In spite of impressive advances in technology, the quality of care and especially prevention and health promotion have not progressed to the desired extent. It was realized that in everyday clinical practice the person was not receiving the attention he or she deserved. The completion of ten years of consistent work and advocacy with institutional independence and self-sufficiency is a definite accomplishment in itself. This milestone provides a good opportunity to pause and consider what the College has managed to achieve so far. The meaning and implication of person-centered medicine have been clarified with the development of the Person-centered Care Index and the Person- centered Integrative Diagnosis model. From a series of Declarations arising from the Geneva Conferences and the International Congresses held in different regions of the world, an interconnected matrix of practical policies is emerging and the International College feels that the person-centered perspective can contribute to the reestablishment of medical practice with strong ethical commitments and focused on the needs of individual persons as members of the wider population. Person centered medicine restores the equilibrium from the impersonal and reductionist scientific and technological dogma, which by focusing on objects rather than subjects devalues the time for interpersonal interaction, and creates a rift between the person seeking medical care and the damaging demands of over-compartmentalized and commercialized health systems, whereby the quality of care and especially prevention and health promotion have been neglected. The ICPCM believes that these issues need to be seriously addressed and redressed.