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In the present article, we emphasize the symptom experience perspective in person-centred care and discuss barriers to implementation of this approach. There are obstacles to overcome: the diversity of understandings of symptoms in clinical settings, the current biomedical discourse and the incompleteness of symptom research. Since the 19th century, the bio-medical perspective has been powerful in conceptualizing symptoms in terms of pathology and diagnosis. Many diagnoses conjure up preconceived notions about the persons receiving them. This perspective may influence person-centred care negatively. Yet symptoms often mean something beyond the diagnosis. Recognizing this discrepancy, it is crucial that we consider a perspective that starts from each person’s symptom experience, thus complementing the biomedical perspective. Using the notion caring about symptoms, we advocate a person-centred approach that includes a symptom experience perspective. This requires that health-care professionals be skilled in listening to patient narratives and acquire knowledge about how symptom experiences can be individually expressed and interpreted. Listening to symptom experiences may give insights into the personal meaning of illness as well as information about bodily and social restrictions caused by symptom distress. In this way, caring about symptoms will improve the prerequisites for establishing person-centred care planning.

The aim of this study was to explore parents' and therapists' experiences of treatment processes in early childhood interventions. The parents and their therapists reflected on their experiences in joint interviews. The interpretation led to the crystallization of five central themes. The starting point was marked by 'parents' fear versus professional(s') confidence'. This formed the background against which both parties aimed at 'making sense of the situation'. The subsequent therapeutic process was characterized by the parents' and the professionals' 'striving for reciprocal responsiveness' and it led to the 'alteration of inner images'. Finally the two parties made a 'retrospective reflection on the nature of the relation'. Together these themes constitute the co-creation of a therapeutic process by bridging a gap that is created by fear, by power differentials and by differences in familiarity with the context. The parents shoulder responsibility for creating a cooperative relationship, and this is facilitated if they meet a 'normal, friendly and knowledgeable therapist who is capable of admitting that he/she may be wrong'.

In this study families that have struggled with their relationships to their children have identified people who have had a positive influence on the child or the family. By enabling meetings between the parents and these key figures the participants were given an opportunity to together recall their contact. The aim of the study was to examine the understanding they constructed of these beneficial processes. Interpretation according to Max van Manen’s hermeneuticp-phenomenological method led to the crystallization of a number of central themes. These themes together constitute the following whole: these are narratives about ‘emerging mutual trust’, which ‘overcomes obstacles’. The key figures or ‘important persons’ have a ‘clear orientation’ in their occupation and they work in ‘the essential everyday world’ to find and establish ‘contexts that nourish development’ in children and parents. The outcome of this is the creation of ‘new narratives’ that replace the old ones.