[Hospital care:from ordinary ill-treatment to «ordinary beneficence »]

Hospital care: from ordinary ill-treatment to « ordinary beneficence ». Hospitality can be defined as that virtue by which a hospital institution lays the foundations for a person-centered medicine. Indeed, this concept recognizes the patient as a host who is welcomed as a person, i.e. an individual, unique, both rational and irrational, endowed with a psychological continuity that allows him/her to make the narration of his/her life, whose complexity is not only biomedical, but also psychological, social and cultural. In addition, the concept of hospitality is based on an essentially symmetrical and reciprocal relationship between the two hosts, the one who welcomes and the one who is welcomed. This reciprocity allows to compensate for the inevitably asymmetrical nature of the patient-physician relationship of which one of the subjects, the patient, is also the object, giving to the other (the caregiver) the power. In a hospital institution, hospitality can also be defined as the antonym of indifference, that leads too often to the occurrence of what has been described as "ordinary ill-treatment", which could transform paradoxically the hospital into "a world without mercy". The French hospital institution Assistance publique-Hôpitaux de Paris proposed recently to consider hospitality as a principle, to the same extent than quality and safety, and to evaluate its implementation. This strategy promotes the advent in the hospital of what can be described as an "ordinary beneficence.