The basic tenets of palliative care may be summarized as the goal of helping patients to die with dignity. The term "dignity" provides an overarching framework that may guide the physician, patient, and family in defining the objectives and therapeutic considerations fundamental to end-of-life care. Dignity-conserving care is care that may conserve or bolster the dignity of dying patients. Usin...

Maintaining dignity and respect is among patients' most fundamental rights. The importance of patient dignity, the status quo, patients' needs, and a shortage of survey studies in this area were the underlying incentives for conducting this study. This was a cross-sectional descriptive study in which data were collected through Patient Dignity Inventory (PDI). The questionnaire was completed by...

mergency department (ED) overcrowding is the subject of intense study to evaluate its causes and consequences. However, although implied, there is little mention of the threat that overcrowding poses to patient dignity. This threat is intuitively obvious to health care providers and patients in the ED, yet it is elusive to prove, as there is neither a universally accepted definition of dignity ...

BACKGROUND Effective patient-family communication can reduce patients' psychosocial distress and relieve family members' current suffering and their subsequent grief. However, terminally ill patients and their family members often experience great difficulty in communicating their true feelings, concerns, and needs to each other. AIM To develop a novel means of facilitating meaningful convers...

Background While knowledge on factors affecting personal dignity of patients nearing death is quite substantial, far less is known about how patients living with a serious disease understand dignity. Objective To develop a conceptual model of dignity that illuminates the process by which serious illness can undermine patients’ dignity, and that is applicable to a wide patient population. Design...

Background: Chronic renal failure is a life-threatening condition; patients due to the prolonged stress are very susceptible to mental health problems. Dignity therapy is a novel therapeutic approach to the treatment of psychological problems for patients who suffer from life-threatening illnesses. Aim: This study examined the impact of dignity therapy on human dignity in patients undergoing he...

Although the concept of dignity is commonly invoked in clinical care, there is not widespread agreement--in either the academic literature or in everyday clinical conversations--about what dignity means. Without a framework for understanding dignity, it is difficult to determine what threatens patients' dignity and, conversely, how to honor commitments to protect and promote it. This article ai...

BACKGROUND Palliative care is an approach that has been used to care for terminally ill patients. The current study was performed to assess the association between the status of patient dignity and quality of life (QOL) in Iranian terminally ill patients with cancer. MATERIALS AND METHODS This descriptive correlational study was conducted on 210 end-stage cancer patients (102 men and 108 wome...