Welcome to Person Centered Care Advocate
This site is about educating and advocating for Person Centered Care. It is about inspiring those who work with and care for persons living and dying with dementia, to choose Person Centered Care as the standard of practice for all residents and staff in Idaho's care settings.

What is Person Centered Care?
Person Centered Care (PCC) is ethical and evidence based care that puts the person first regardless their level of mental or physical impairment. Person Centered Care evaluates the quality of care being provided and each person's experience of well being, through the eyes of the person receiving that care.                              

Person Centered Care is a holistic and comprehensive delivery care system that meets each person's core needs. These include the need to recieve and give Love, to maintain ones Identity, remember oneslife work, to experience Comfort, to be Included in community, to build meaningful relationships, and to maintain ones essential self regardless level of dementia.

How is Person Centered Care different?
In care settings,you may have heard about Culture Change. This term describes the how long term care facilities provide services and their approach for individualized care.   Tom Kitwood's Person Centered Care model, Gentle Care and other person centered approaches,  acknowledge and accept each resident as a whole person, and provides moral and ethical development of care staff. Person Centered Care can transform the work place into a positive enriching social and learning environment that enhances the quality of life for staff, residents and family.  The Margaret T. Morris Center in Prescott Arizona is dedicated to Person Centered Care, and is a living example of how Person Centered Care is spiritual practice in holistic, comprehensive and loving dementia care.  

Comprehensive Person Center Care is evidenced and Outcomes Based and supported by extensive research.  The Bradford Dementia Group and Jentle Harts Consulting provide education to help others begin transforming medical model care to person centered, spirit centered care.   The expeirence of care and quality of life can be measured using Dementia Care Mapping (DCM). This effective tool documents and tracks each resident’s experience of well and ill being over time through direct observation of resident’s behavior without surrogate interpretation. DCM can help indicate need for best practice intervention, care planning, activities and staff assignments.

Last Update January 16, 2010  Skeeter Lynch, LMSI stratpath@moscow.com