Getting Person‐Centred Fundamental Care Right: Past Discourse and Future Directions

I have been in nursing over half a century.My specialism is how we provide person-centred fundamental care (PCFC) to our patients/clients/family.My journey began in my undergraduate and registered nursing experiences leading to exploring in my doctoral studies the therapeutic role of the nurse.Such a role was closely aligned with nurses' articulation of PCFC, and the importance of being able to combine its physical, psychosocial and relational aspects within a setting that supported such work.Not knowing how to get this knowledge into practice, I set off on another journey around standard setting, quality improvement, clinical guideline development, evidence-based practice and implementation science.A crisis in the UK in the early 2000s (Francis 2013) prompted a return to researching PCFC.I was not convinced that the outcomes of the Francis report told the whole story.Through a systematic collaborative process, I explored how we could redefine, reclaim and promote better PCFC (Kitson et al. 2013;Feo et al. 2018).Getting PCFC right was a global challenge, not unique to one country, health or political system: the challenges being ontological, epistemological, professional, societal and political.The Journal of Advanced Nursing (JAN) has been a stalwart in both my personal and professional journey.I will argue that we are on the cusp of a paradigm shift in health and care and one that nursing could and should be leading on behalf of society.