Human rights, including the right to health, are grounded in protecting and promoting human dignity. Although commitment to human dignity is a widely shared value, the precise meaning and requirements behind the term are elusive. It is also unclear as to how a commitment to human dignity translates into specific human rights, such as the right to the highest attainable standard of health, and d...

BACKGROUND Internationally, increasing attention is being paid to understanding patient experiences of health care. Within palliative care, the Views of Informal Carers - Evaluation of Services (VOICES) questionnaire is commonly used for this purpose. Among its objectives is to ask family members if their relatives were treated with dignity at the end of life. This is regarded as useful for und...

How to cite this article: Körtner, U.H.J., 2011, ‘Human dignity and biomedical ethics from a Christian theological perspective’, HTS Teologiese Studies/Theological Studies 67(3), Art. #953, 8 pages. doi:10.4102/hts.v67i3.953 The argument of human dignity plays an important role in current debates on human rights and their relevance in modern biomedicine. When discussing the contribution of Chri...

As many scholars have noted, the concept of “dignity” has historically been defined in several ways, creating conflict and confusion when the concept is invoked in the present. The concept has also been historically exclusive of various groups of individuals; some contemporary accounts still do not understand certain individuals with disabilities as possessing dignity. I examine the strength of...

Dignity is a key value within healthcare. Technology is also recognized as being a fundamental part of healthcare delivery, but also a potential cause of dehumanization of the patient. Therefore, understanding how medical devices can be designed to help deliver dignity is important. This paper explores the role of empathy tools as a way of engendering empathy in engineers and designers to enabl...

Dignity is a slippery concept to define - yet it has been at the heart of media and policy debates around the provision of health and social care in recent years; particularly in the United Kingdom following the Mid-Staffordshire scandal and subsequent Francis Inquiry. This paper considers the concept of dignity in care from the perspective of student nurses. Thus, it allows us to discuss how p...

The concept of dignity is the foundation of fundamental rights expressed in international declarations on human rights and bioethics. Sometimes there are collisions of rights, which must be weighed. However, more often dignity is invoked in order to argue for or against the same issue. Is it possible that a concept can be so broad that it becomes meaningless? What do we mean when we argue for m...

This article attempts, first of all, to define the concept of human dignity in tandem with a Christian ethics of responsibility. The views on human dignity, held by some proponents of a Christian ethics of responsibility, and a number of South African and Dutch theologians who participated in two joint consultations, are discussed and critically evaluated. Second, this article addresses the fol...

Introduction: Dignity is considered as fundamental human needs and recognized as one of the central concepts in nursing science. The aim of this study was to assess the extent to which patients' dignity is respected and to evalutae its relationship with contextual variables. Methods: This cross-sectional study was conducted on 256 hospitalized patients in the two teaching hospitals affiliated t...

In Japan, there are no acts and, specific provisions or official guidelines on euthanasia, but recently, as I will mention below, an official guideline on "death with dignity" has been made. Nevertheless in fact, this guideline provides only a few rules of process on terminal care. Therefore the problems of euthanasia and "death with dignity" are mainly left to the legal interpretation by liter...