ORIGINAL ARTICLE Personhood and dementia: revisiting Tom Kitwood’s ideas Jan Dewing BSc, PhD, RGN, MN, RNT, Dip N, Dip N Ed Independent Consultant Nurse, Associate Lecturer, University of Ulster, Northern Ireland, and Visiting Fellow, Northumbria University, UK Submitted for publication: 30 September 2006 Accepted for publication: 2 October 2007 Correspondence: Jan Dewing E-mail: jan.dewing@btinternet.com DEWING J DEWING J . (2008) (2008) International Journal of Older People Nursing 3, 3–13 Personhood and dementia: revisiting Tom Kitwood’s ideas Person-centred care is often cited as an aim of gerontological nursing and promotion of personhood is said to be the basis for person-centred care. As such, it forms a cornerstone value for many gerontological nurses, particularly those working in dementia care. Tom Kitwood’s ideas and definition of personhood are widely re- ferred to in the literature and used in the dementia care field. More recently, there is a move to critique and partially reject Kitwood’s ideas on personhood. This paper has three aims: (i) to explore some central ideas around key theories of personhood (ii) to critique Kitwood’s work on personhood. (iii) To summarize current critiques of Kitwood’s ideas and provide a response that outlines why Kitwoods’ ideas are still relevant. It is suggested many critiques ignore Kitwoods’ ultimate purpose; that of moral concern for ‘others’. However, the main criticism put forward in this paper is that, rather than completely rejecting personhood theories, Kitwood locates his work on what it means to be a person within a traditional Cartesian personhood framework, albeit from a revised or pragmatic viewpoint. Finally, it is suggested that definitions of persons and personhood need to take account of the body and time (corporeality and temporality) and gerontological nursing may want to reassess how much allegiance is given to basing nursing frameworks on the concept of personhood. Key words: dementia, gerontological nursing, Kitwood, older person, person, person-centredness, personhood Introduction There is increasing recognition that further work is needed on the application of concepts of person-centred care in practice (Dewing, 2004; McCormack, 2004; Nolan et al., 2004; Ashburner, 2005) and research (O’Connor et al., 2007). In addition, Dewing (2004) suggests despite the concept of ‘person’ being one of the foundations for nursing theories and models, greater clarity is still required on what is meant by person-centredness. With an emerging haste to develop frameworks for use in practice and research, it is vital current understandings of person- centredness are elaborated to ensure frameworks are developing on the basis of congruent philosophical and theoretical clarity. Person-centredness as an attribute of gerontological nurs- ing is generally based on the promotion of personhood. Thus, at the core of clarifying person-centredness lies a philosoph- ical and theoretical appreciation of the nature of personhood. Until recently, much of Kitwood’s ideas on personhood have been either uncritically accepted (for example, Ashburner, 2005; Cowdell, 2006; McCarthy, 2006) or rejected as having limited relevance for practice (for example, Adams, 1996; Nolan et al., 2002a). As a lead into the discussion in this paper and in a very general sense, personhood can be understood as, the attributes possessed by human beings that make them a person. This statement will be further elabo- rated as the paper progresses. This paper has three aims; firstly as way of establishing context, some of the central ideas and key theories of Ó 2008 The Author. Journal compilation Ó 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd 3