Objectives: The aim of this study was to determine the factors affecting the sense of dignity of patients with mental health disorders during hospitalization. Methods: We employed a cross-sectional research design. The study population comprised adult patients who have been admitted to mental health wards of Iran psychiatry hospitals. A convenient sampling method was applied. Data was collecte...

The words in the title were used by an elderly medical widow whose circumstances changed suddenly and she did not know where to turn to or how she was going to manage. The Royal Medical Benevolent Fund was contacted and as a result of her application and the back up report of the Area Visitor, this lady has been helped and her worries have been lifted from her shoulders. These words of thanks s...

Almost all living things act to free themselves from harmful contacts. A kind of freedom is achieved by the relatively simple forms of behavior called reflexes. A person sneezes and frees his respiratory passages from irritating substances. He vomits and frees his stomach from indigestible or poisonous food. He pulls back his hand and frees it from a sharp or hot object. More elaborate forms of...

T he present health care environment conflicts with the values in· ternalized by many clinicians Patient care seems to be subordinated to a set of rules governing the length of hos· pitalization. The decision makers in health care seem to take a clerical rather than a clinical perspective. As one frustrated clinician exclaimed, "Forget TLC; it's DRGs that count." Although the feelings in this t...

In previous issues of nursing and midwifery studies, several articles have published on nursing ethics and ethical issues in caring. Ghorbani et al. studied nurses' perception of the ethical environment. They suggested that hospital managers need to discover better ways to promote ethical environment of the healthcare organizations (1). Berkiten Ergin et al. have also concluded that cultural di...

In recent years a succession of writers has lamented that a society which has the highest standard of living should also have the lowest standard of dying. Death, they maintain, has replaced sex as the most unmentionable taboo, and the act of dying has become lonely, mechanical, dehumanised, and at times gruesome.' Some have referred to the "obscenity of modern dying," exemplified by an imperso...