Proponents of the legalization of assisted suicide often appeal to our supposed right to "die with dignity" to defend their case. I examine and assess different notions of "dignity" that are operating in many arguments for the legalization of assisted suicide, and I find them all to be deficient. I then consider an alternative conception of dignity that is based on Aristotle's conception of the...

The promotion of patient dignity is an important aspect of healthcare provision. However, there is evidence to suggest that patient dignity is not being promoted as expected and a number of attributing factors have been suggested in the literature. This article proposes that healthcare educators should incorporate the subject of dignity in its own right within the curriculum. Attempts in teachi...

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...

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...