Abstract

This article offers commentary on a work in the same journal issue. I argue that the authors, Entwistle and Watt, approach person-centered care in health care with a questionable focus on the understanding of concepts as the primary causal mechanism and bracket-out considerations of the structural conditions of medical practice. I argue that the challenges in implementing person-centered care have not been from a difficulty articulating and/or understanding such goals, but from failing to address existing systemic pressures that are preventing health care and health care professionals from addressing patients as persons in the fullest sense. Any examination of person-centered care and its challenges should consider the co-determining nature of the material and the conceptual/ethical.