This paper is derived from research I undertook as a part of my honours degree in nursing. My research produced a thesis that examined person-centred care in Australian residential aged-care settings. The idea for this came from my 15 years’ experience as an aged-care nurse and questions arising from my lived experience of person-centred care not being a reality for residents, families and staff despite being widely espoused in the aged-care sector. The sector in Australia is undergoing a system redesign, with proposals for a new Aged Care Act put forward this year by the Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety (RCACQS, 2021) after a review of the aged-care system between 2018 and 2021. The review looked into the prevalence of elder abuse and estimated that almost 40% of residents may have experienced emotional, physical or neglectful abuse (RCACQS, 2020a). Person-centred care could be an important concept to establish in Australian residential aged care in order to tackle the experience of abuse and embed high-quality, safe services.

The concept

The concept of person-centred care is seen as an emerging practice in Australia (Australian Commission on Safety and Quality in Health Care [ACSQHC], 2022), and there is no global consensus on a definition (Behrens et al., 2019; Nolte et al., 2020). No definition could be located within the Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission (ACQSC) or the accreditation standards (ACQSC, 2020, 2021a; My Aged Care, 2023). Accreditation against the quality standards does not include measurement of person-centred care (ACQSC, 2021b).

This article by Brianna Elise is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial 3.0 License.