Article Text
Abstract
Declarations of the importance of dignity in health care are commonplace in codes of practice and other mission statements, yet these documents never clarify dignity’s meaning. Their vague aspirations are compared to comments from staff and patients about opportunities for and barriers against the promotion of dignity in elderly care institutions. These suggest that while nurses and health care assistants have an intuitive understanding of dignity, they either do not or cannot always bring it about in practice. Thus, despite stated intentions to promote dignity, it appears that the circumstances of at least some elderly care institutions cause patients to experience avoidable indignities. Such institutions are “undignifying institutions” because they fail to acknowledge dignity’s basic components, focus excessively on quantifiable priorities, and have insufficient resources available to assure consistently dignifying care. As a partial solution, we argue that health workers should be taught to understand and specify the components of dignity, which will better prepare them to challenge undignifying practices and to recognise opportunities for dignity promotion.
- Elderly care institutions
- dignity
- codes of ethics
- practical application of philosophy
Statistics from Altmetric.com
Footnotes
-
↵* At the time of writing A Gallagher was a Research Assistant at the former School of Health, Biological and Environmental Sciences, Middlesex University, London, UK
Read the full text or download the PDF:
Other content recommended for you
- Understanding the healthcare workplace learning culture through safety and dignity narratives: a UK qualitative study of multiple stakeholders’ perspectives
- Dignity: not such a useless concept
- Dignity of the patient-–family unit: further understanding in hospice palliative care
- Dignitarian medical ethics
- Professionalism dilemmas, moral distress and the healthcare student: insights from two online UK-wide questionnaire studies
- Respectful care of human dignity: how is it perceived by patients and nurses?
- Ethical dilemmas for palliative care nurses: systematic review
- Patients' perception of dignity in Iranian healthcare settings: a qualitative content analysis
- Patients’ attitudes, the hospital environment, and staff behaviour affected patients’ dignity on a surgical ward
- Presentation of the clothed self on the hospital ward: an ethnographic account of perceptual attention and implications for the personhood of people living with dementia