The European Society for Person Centered Healthcare (ESPCH) is a professional body of multi-disciplinary clinicians, academics, expert patients, patient advocacy groups, policymakers and economists. Created in shadow form in late 2013, the ESPCH became fully operationally functional from January 2014. The Society’s mission is to address the challenges that clinicians and healthcare systems now face in terms of the increasing depersonalisation of clinical care and the current – and growing - epidemic of long term chronic illness. The Society is principally interested in the development of models of clinical practice which allow affordable biomedical and technological advances to be delivered to patients, but within a humanistic framework of care that applies science in a manner which respects patients as persons and which takes full account of their values, preferences, narratives, cultural context, fears, worries, anxieties, hopes and aspirations and which thus recognises and responds to their emotional, psychological and spiritual necessities in addition to their physical needs. The Society takes as read that such models of practice would extend empathy and compassion to the sick patient within a dialogical process of shared decision-making and within a relationship of equality, mutual responsibility and trust. The Society’s purpose is to promote this vision and to drive forward a shift of European (and international) clinical practice away from impersonal, fragmented and decontextualized models of healthcare, towards personalisation, integration and contextualization. When the Society’s models of care and publications become available they will be discussed directly with health policy-makers and governments.