European Standard for Person-Centered Care
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Why is it a good practice of the Person-Centered Model?
Project coordinated by the Centre for Person-Centered Care at the University of Gothenburg (GPCC) which in 2020 developed the first European standard on person-centered care. The document offers a common guide to facilitate its implementation and evaluation in health and social services in different European countries.
Person-centered approach: Defines minimum requirements and quality criteria for person-centered care in health, research and care practice. It was developed in collaboration with professionals, researchers and European organizations, guaranteeing transferability and methodological coherence.
Integrated Assessment (Person, Family, Housing) and Life History
This initiative does not perform direct individual assessments or compile personal life histories. Instead, it establishes a structural framework intended for health and care institutions: one that ensures that the person’s narrative — their history, preferences, context and values — becomes a foundational element in care. The standard calls for care systems to recognise patients as persons with unique biographies and to embed that recognition at every stage of care, not merely as a medical record. In doing so, it promotes a shift from disease-centred assessments to person-centred understanding.
Personalised Care and Support Plan for the Life Project
The standard provides minimum requirements for implementing person-centred care across services. It recommends that care plans be co-created with patients (and, where relevant, their families/carers), guided by the patient’s own narrative and goals rather than rigid protocols. This enables baseline conditions under which personalised care plans become truly adaptive: professionals and organisations use the standard as a guide to design, manage and regularly review care and support plans that respect individuals’ values, life projects and evolving needs.
Support groups
Although the standard itself is not a “support-group” initiative, one of its aims is to promote patient and family/carer involvement at all levels — including in the design, evaluation and improvement of services. This implies recognition of patient organisations, peer groups, carers’ associations and other collective bodies as valid actors in care processes. The standard thus fosters systemic structures that value participation and input from communities of users, creating opportunities for collective reflection, empowerment and shared responsibility in care.
Case Management and Resource Coordinator
The standard defines requirements at both organizational and point-of-care levels. It encourages institutions to integrate processes for shared decision-making, documentation, care planning, and patient participation in management and policy. While it does not itself provide case-management services, it lays the foundation for creating consistent coordination mechanisms within services: ensuring that care is not fragmented, but structured around the person — including assessment, planning, documentation and follow-up, as well as involvement of the individual and, where appropriate, their carers, in those processes.
Highlined results
Was established as the first European standard in this area, becoming a reference tool to improve care quality and guide policies and practices from a person-centered approach.
Inspiring ideas for other enviorments. It can works! 😉
This standard shows that person-centred care doesn’t have to be aspirational or vague — it can be concretely defined, operationalised and embedded into regulatory or quality-assurance frameworks. By providing a Europe-wide minimum standard, it equips health and social care providers, policymakers and patient organisations with a common reference: ensuring dignity, participation, individualisation and quality across contexts. The model can be adopted in diverse settings — hospitals, long-term care, social services — serving as a template to redesign care systems around people, not diseases. It proves that respect, participation and equitable care are compatible with structured, scalable systems.
Other observations
University of Gothenburg (GPCC)