UK health policy has increasingly recognised that the quality of patients' experiences is important and there is a clear expectation that patients' dignity should be promoted in healthcare. Patients undergoing surgery are particularly vulnerable to their dignity being diminished. Operating department staff should ensure that dignity is promoted through attention to patients' privacy and through...

Just over twenty years ago, on November 8, 1994, Oregon became the first state to decriminalize “physician assisted suicide.” On that day, by a margin of 51 to 49 percent, voters passed the Oregon Death with Dignity Act, a ballot initiative now codified at ORS 127.800 127.897. The Death with Dignity Act permits state licensed, Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) registered physicians and phar...

I ncreasingly, the question of whether some forms of research, such as human cloning, infringe notions of human dignity has been proposed as a primary justifi cation for the development of science policy. This is understandable. A commitment to human dignity is a widely shared value and the foundation for our understanding of human rights. The preamble to the Universal Declaration of Human Righ...

BACKGROUND Maintaining dignity is an important element of end-of-life care and also of the care given in nursing homes. Factors influencing personal dignity have been studied from both nursing home residents' and staff's perspective. Little is however known about the way nursing home staff perceive and promote the personal dignity of individual residents in daily practice, or about staff's expe...

BACKGROUND Motor neurone disease (MND) practice guidelines suggest developing interventions that will promote hope, meaning, and dignity to alleviate psychological distress, but very little research has been done. This study begins to address this need by exploring the use of dignity therapy with people with MND. Dignity therapy is a brief psychotherapy that promotes hope, meaning and dignity, ...

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...

Jonathan Mann asserted that violations of dignity serve as underlying factors that negatively impact the health of individuals. He called for the public health community to develop an empirical understanding of ill health through the fundamental concept of dignity. This article explores definitions of dignity and presents a model to demonstrate how violations of dignity may cause chronic stress...

In this review of Leon Kass’s Life, liberty and the defense of dignity and Deryck Beyleveld and Roger Brownsword’s Human dignity in bioethics and biolaw. I consider the prospects for a theory of dignity as a basis for bioethics research. I argue that dignity theories are worth exploring in more detail, but that research needs to consider both ‘‘antitheory’’ accounts of the language of bioethics...

The human dignity of patients with cardiovascular disease (CVD) is an important issue, because of patients' dependence upon caregivers, and because it impacts all aspects of their quality of life (QOL). Therefore, understanding and improving the status of dignity among these patients is of great importance. This study aimed to determine the status of dignity in patients with CVD admitted to car...