When we need health and care services, we are often at our most vulnerable. In those moments, whatever the setting or circumstance, we want the same thing: to be cared for safely, effectively, and to be treated as individuals. We want to be understood, respected, involved, and supported in ways that honour who we are and what matters most to us.

This simple idea sits at the heart of person centred care. It has shaped our purpose for more than three decades and continues to guide how we work with individuals, teams, and systems to embed compassion and dignity into every interaction.

Person centred approaches strengthen far more than experience alone. When care is shaped around what matters, outcomes improve. Safety strengthens, quality rises, efficiency increases, and inequalities narrow. This is only possible when staff experience is valued with equal commitment. People cannot deliver person centred care if they do not receive it themselves. Supportive, respectful working environments are therefore inseparable from the experience of those receiving care.

This is why Picker exists: to support the creation of cultures, systems, insights, and standards where the highest quality person centred care becomes the reliable reality for everyone.

Picker was founded on a deeply personal insight. In the late 1980s, Jean Sovatkin Picker was navigating a long term degenerative illness. She was a former United States delegate to the United Nations, an advocate for human rights, and a woman of remarkable strength. Yet even in leading American hospitals, she and her husband Harvey Picker found that care was clinically advanced but not attentive to people’s needs, preferences, or lived realities.

Jean’s experience left a profound impression on Harvey, a physicist, inventor, educator, philanthropist, and, above all, a husband who believed care should always treat people as people.

Together, Harvey and Jean set out to change healthcare for the better.

• They collaborated with the Commonwealth Fund of New York to launch the Picker/Commonwealth Programme for Patient Centred Care in 1987.
• The landmark publication Through the Patient’s Eyes followed in 1993. 

With it came the birth of the Picker Principles of Person Centred Care, and the establishment of the Picker Institute, founded to turn people’s experiences into lasting improvement in the quality of care.