The four core values of person-centered care are dignity and respect, information sharing, participation, and collaboration. These were established by the Institute for Patient- and Family-Centered Care (IPFCC) and have become the most widely referenced framework in healthcare for shifting the focus from what clinicians do to patients toward what they do with them.
While other organizations have developed their own frameworks, the IPFCC’s four concepts are the ones most commonly taught in nursing programs, referenced in hospital policies, and built into accreditation standards. Here’s what each one means in practice.
Dignity and Respect
This first value requires that healthcare practitioners listen to and honor patient and family perspectives and choices. It goes beyond basic politeness. A patient’s knowledge, values, beliefs, and cultural background should actively shape how their care is planned and delivered, not just be acknowledged and set aside.
In practice, this looks like a provider asking about your priorities before jumping into a treatment plan. If you have strong preferences about pain management, end-of-life decisions, or how your family is involved, those preferences carry real weight in the care you receive. A provider practicing dignity and respect treats you as the expert on your own life, even when they’re the expert on the medical science.
Information Sharing
Person-centered care requires that you receive complete, unbiased, and timely information so you can actually participate in decisions about your health. This means providers communicate in ways that are clear and useful, not buried in jargon or filtered through assumptions about what you can handle.
One practical tool that captures this value is the one-page profile, used in many care settings. It’s a simple document where a person records their strengths, what works and doesn’t work for them, their goals for the coming year, and how others can best support them. It gives every provider on a care team immediate access to what matters most to the patient, rather than starting from scratch at each visit. The profile includes things like how someone prefers to communicate, what makes them feel supported, and what causes them stress. Information sharing isn’t just about test results flowing from provider to patient. It’s bidirectional: your knowledge about your own life flows back to the care team.
Participation
The third core value is that patients and families are encouraged and supported in participating in care and decision-making at the level they choose. That last phrase matters. Person-centered care doesn’t force you into a decision-making role you’re not comfortable with. Some people want to weigh every option themselves. Others prefer their provider to make a strong recommendation. Both are valid, and the key is that you’re given the genuine opportunity to choose your level of involvement.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services illustrates this with the example of a patient with asthma. Rather than simply prescribing an inhaler, the provider follows up to identify contributing factors like smoking and housing conditions. Together, they build a comprehensive plan that considers health, behavioral, and social needs. The plan includes connecting the patient with a smoking cessation program when they’re ready (not before), and with community partners who can help address environmental triggers in their home. The patient’s readiness and preferences drive the timeline.
Collaboration
Collaboration extends participation beyond individual care decisions into the systems that shape healthcare itself. Under this value, patients, families, practitioners, and healthcare leaders work together on policy development, program design, facility layout, professional education, and research.
This is the value that distinguishes person-centered care from simply being a nice provider. It means patients sit on hospital advisory boards, help design new clinic spaces, participate in quality improvement projects, and co-develop educational materials. The idea is that people who use the healthcare system have insights that professionals alone cannot replicate, and those insights should influence how the system operates at every level.
How These Values Affect Outcomes
The four core values aren’t just philosophical ideals. Research published in BMJ Open Quality found that patients who rated their provider communication highly had 27% lower odds of hospital readmission within 30 days. Patients who received strong transition planning at discharge had 21% lower odds of visiting the emergency department within a week. Good information sharing about medications was independently linked to fewer unplanned returns to the hospital. These aren’t small margins, and they connect directly to the core values of information sharing and participation.
Other Frameworks Worth Knowing
The IPFCC framework is the most commonly cited, but it’s not the only one. The Health Foundation in the UK identifies four slightly different principles: affording people dignity, compassion, and respect; offering coordinated care; offering personalized care; and supporting people to develop their own strengths and abilities to live independently. This framework places more emphasis on coordination between services and on building a person’s capacity to manage their own health.
The World Health Organization takes a broader, systems-level approach with five strategic directions: empowering people and communities, strengthening governance, reorienting models of care, coordinating services across sectors, and creating an enabling environment. If you’re studying for a healthcare course or working in policy, knowing which framework is being referenced matters, since the specific values differ depending on the source. For most clinical and educational settings in the U.S., the IPFCC’s four concepts of dignity, information sharing, participation, and collaboration are the standard answer.