Personalised Care Week 2026 - Your Thoughts, Your Voice

Gavin Street, Marketing Officer, NHS Lincolnshire, and Expert by Experience

For me, personalisation is really about seeing the person, not just the care or support they need.

It sounds obvious, but I think it’s something we can easily lose sight of, and I’ve experienced that first hand many times. My Mum has been on her dementia journey for more than five years now, and that experience has really brought home to me what personalised care should mean. Dementia may have changed what she can do and how she communicates, but it hasn’t changed the fact that she is still a person in her own right - someone who deserves to be heard, understood and treated with dignity, and who still has a right to a life that includes comfort, connection, enjoyment and the things that matter to her. I’ve seen how easily that personhood can become secondary to processes, routines, assessments and the practicalities of providing care.

We have processes, pathways, policies and targets for good reasons, but far too often it can feel as though people are expected to fit around the way our services work, rather than the other way round.

Personalisation is about taking the time to discover what really matters to someone. Not just what’s wrong, what they need help with, or which service they fit into, but who they are, what’s important to them, what they want from their life, and what a good day looks like for them.

At its heart, it’s about recognising every person’s right to a good quality of life, a life that includes as much of what matters to them, brings them meaning and makes life worth living as we can help make possible.

It’s also about recognising what people already have, not just what they need. Everyone brings their own strengths, experience, knowledge, relationships and support networks. Our role in health and care should be to help people recognise and build on those things, so they feel more able to shape and realise the life they want to live.

I also think we need to be honest that offering people a choice doesn’t necessarily mean we are truly personalising care. If all the choices are things we have already decided are available, we are still setting the boundaries and, to some extent, defining what someone’s life or care can look like.

For care to be genuinely personalised, we need to listen. And we need to be truly curious when we do, not simply listening for the information we need to complete an assessment or make a decision. And, crucially, we need to be willing to do something differently because of what we hear.

What gives me hope is that I believe there is a real appetite to do this better. We don’t need a perfect system before we can provide more personalised care. We just need to keep reminding ourselves that behind every assessment, every referral and every care plan is a real person, with a life that matters to them.

Their voice, their choices, their relationships, their strengths and the things that give their life meaning should genuinely matter to us too.