Client Centered Care

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The aim of this assignment is to develop a deeper understanding of client centered-care by exploring its meaning, misconceptions, significance, how it relates to professional caring and how it will influence and affect my practice as a future registered nurse. This will be done by exploring a clinical scenario that I recently encountered during one of my clinical days. As mention above the concept I chose is client centered care because it is an important framework for conceptualizing health care. So what is client centered care? According to the Registered Nurses Association of Ontario Best Practice Guidelines (RNAO BPG), the client is viewed as a whole person; therefore, client-centered care involves advocacy, empowerment and respect for the client’s autonomy, voice, self- determination and participation in decision-making. The institute of Medicine defined client centered care as “care that is responsive to individual client needs and values and it guides the treatment of decisions”. There might be various definitions of client centered care however, whichever way you look at it; they all encompass two important characteristics, which is patient involvement and individualization of care.

So how does this concept of client centered care relate to professional caring, there are two well-known nursing theories about caring and nursing they are Madeleine Leininger’s theory of cultural care and Jean Watson’s theory of human care. These two theorists might not have known at the time that they were theorizing about client-centered care but they were. These two theories have common components of client centered care they both looked at nursing as caring for the client as a whole not just one aspect of care. For instance, Leininger theory talks about caring and culture and how they relate to each other when providing care. She focused on how care is the essence and
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