Stephen Buetow, an associate professor and deputy head of the Department of General Practice and Primary Health Care at New Zealand’s University of Auckland, will discuss “Person-Centered Medicine: Balancing the Welfare of Physicians and Patients” on Thursday, June 25, at 11:30 am in the Health Sciences Center, Level 3, Room 067. The lecture is part of the Center for Medical Humanities, Compassionate Care and Bioethics colloquium series.
Medicine faces a crisis of depersonalization, scientism and unsustainable costs, which cannot be solved by subprime national initiatives to produce, from evidence, medicine centered on patients. One of the most prominent initiatives is taking place in the U.S., where comprehensive health reforms are integrating patient-centered concepts into standards of clinical care through innovations in service delivery like patient-centered medical homes. Yet, patient-centered medicine is part of the overall problem.
Raising concerns about a patient-centered medical ethics of principle-governed action for patient welfare and population health, this lecture will suggest a need instead for person-centered medicine. Despite having received the imprimatur of international organizations including the World Health Organization, person-centered medicine (or people-centered medicine) has yet to define itself clearly. Buetow will suggest eight defining values of person-centered medicine, which distinguish this medical practice model conceptually from values of patient-centered medicine. He will also suggest that the values of person-centered medicine link to virtues that dispose patients and physicians, as moral equals, to balance their welfare, by doing the right things for the right reasons, and flourish.
Buetow, a social scientist by background, holds a PhD from the Australian National University and worked as a research fellow at the UK’s National Primary Care Research and Development Centre. He has published two books and more than 140 peer-reviewed journal articles, most recently in the area of social theory and medicine. Buetow is currently writing a book, Person-Centered Medicine: Balancing the Welfare of Physicians and Patients. He is also an associate editor of the Journal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice and European Journal for Person-Centered Healthcare. He directs a core, postgraduate research methods course at his university, has supervised nine PhD students to successful completion and has chaired numerous national funding committees.
For more information about the lecture, please contact Michael Ortega at michael.ortega@stonybrook.edu or (631) 444-8029.
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