Trends in person-centered care research: A quantitative content analysis using text network analysis

Purpose: Person-centered care prioritizes individual needs and preferences for providing high-quality care throughout a person’s lifetime. With recent changes in the healthcare landscape, person-centered care has gained significant prominence.Methods: Keywords were extracted from the abstracts of 2,289 person-centered care related papers and analyzed using Netminer 4.5.0. The extracted keywords were refined through frequency analysis and term frequency-inverse document frequency. A keyword network was constructed to visually represent keyword co-occurrence frequency as links, thereby enabling the identification of keyword connectivity. Degree centrality, betweenness centrality, and closeness centrality were calculated to assess core concepts and their interrelationships.Results: The three most frequently occurring keywords were patient-centered care, caregiver, and goal, which exhibited strong connections with illness and planning. Among these, goal and caregiver demonstrated a high degree of betweenness and closeness centrality.Conclusion: More than half of all person-centered care related studies have been published since 2020, reflecting a recent paradigm shift in healthcare services and the growing emphasis on person-centered care. The prominence of the term goal in the centrality analysis suggests that person-centered care’s focus on respecting individuals’ beliefs, values, autonomy, and dignity has garnered substantial research attention. Moreover, the high centrality of the term caregiver indicates that numerous studies have investigated the role and competencies of caregivers in implementing person-centered care. As healthcare policies and environments evolve, expanding the role of nurses is essential. Further research is recommended for developing nursing education and interventions from the care recipient’s perspective to enhance person-centered care implementation.