Person-Centred Care and Dementia

Abstract

Person-centred approaches in dementia, based on the concept of personhood, have undoubtedly provided a fulcrum to challenging and changing traditional approaches to dementia care. Over the past two decades, there has been a significant growth in awareness of dementia and a developing discourse on the potential to fundamentally change the experience of living with dementia. The growing visibility and voice of people living with dementia has offered an important challenge to the systematic marginalisation and invisibility that has long been a characteristic experience. There have been some real achievements in changing awareness, attitude and approaches to the care and support of people living with dementia, and arguably, a more positive view of dementia has been achieved. The message that it is possible to ‘live well’ with dementia is included at least in its general message, in the national dementia strategy for England. Yet, it is evident that structural, social and interpersonal factors continue to negatively impact on and shape the lived experience of people with dementia. This chapter argues that despite the fundamentally important role that person-centred approaches have played, and will doubtlessly continue to play, it is inevitably limited in addressing structural and social processes which influence the experience of living with dementia.