Training clinicians in whole person-centred healthcare

Abstract

Since 1987 in New Zealand a form of person-centred healthcare has emerged, which was originally loosely  referred to as ‘medicine and story’ and then developed into a University program titled MindBody Healthcare, but more recently has been described in clinical settings and publications as the Whole Person Approach. This paper emphasises the co-emergence of physicality and subjectivity from conception and the harm that comes from keeping mind and body apart in the treatment of physical illness of all kinds. Symbolic physical diseases provide particularly vivid and glaring examples of the need to attend to patient subjectivity as a part of treatment. Clinicians must learn to deal with whole persons and the patient’s story is a practical doorway into the complexity of this whole. Training clinicians over two decades to become whole person-focussed and competent has revealed that clinicians need sustained education to move from the typical Western healthcare dualistic view of patients with physical disease to a unitive, non-dualistic, whole person understanding. It takes time, practice, support and supervision for this to be expressed comfortably in clinical settings. The shift from expert clinician-to-disease focus to a more human-to-human dynamic, underwriting everything that is done, can be very challenging for some clinicians. Specific attitudes are required and some skills in eliciting relevant story can be learned quite easily. There are many sources of resistances to these changes in the health institutions and clinicians are more of a problem than patients. Each clinical discipline within the health sector tends to have unique problems. But the rewards for whole person practice are great for both clinicians and patients.