Currently submitted to: JMIR Nursing
Date Submitted: Dec 16, 2025
Open Peer Review Period: Dec 24, 2025 - Feb 18, 2026
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“Personhood, Wholeness and Person-Centred Nursing Care: A Theological–Ethical Perspective”
ABSTRACT
Background:
Person-centred care (PCC) is a foundational principle of nursing practice, emphasising dignity, compassion, and respect for individuals receiving care. While PCC is commonly framed in relation to physical, psychological, and social dimensions of health, the spiritual dimension becomes particularly salient in contexts of long-term illness, disability, and end-of-life care. Patients whose bodies no longer conform to normative expectations of health and independence are at risk of being reduced to diagnoses or prognoses, undermining person-centred practice.
Objective:
This paper aims to strengthen conceptual foundations for person-centred nursing care by articulating a relational account of personhood that affirms the dignity and wholeness of sick and dying bodies, particularly in contexts where cure is no longer possible.
Methods:
This is a conceptual and interdisciplinary analysis drawing on nursing ethics, disability theology, and bioethics. Ezekiel 37 is used as a theologically informed interpretive resource to explore relational understandings of personhood and healing, without presupposing religious belief.
Results:
Relational accounts of personhood challenge functional and capacity-based models that implicitly link human worth to autonomy, cognition, or productivity. Interpreted conceptually, Ezekiel 37 offers a framework in which personhood is grounded in relational address rather than bodily integrity or responsiveness. This perspective reframes healing as the alleviation of relational and existential suffering through presence, language, and compassionate care, even in the absence of physical recovery.
Conclusions:
A relational understanding of personhood supports person-centred nursing practice by resisting dehumanising narratives of decline and sustaining dignity at the end of life. This framework offers ethically robust conceptual resources for spiritual care that are attentive to patients’ sources of meaning while remaining compatible with pluralistic healthcare contexts. Clinical Trial: n/a
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