The Importance of Human Dignity in Healthcare and Nursing

This article discusses the concept of human dignity in healthcare and nursing, and its impact on service users. It highlights the importance of maintaining dignity and the strategies that nursing professionals can use to achieve it. The article also emphasizes the role of informed consent, gentle touch, and privacy in preserving the dignity of patients.

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Human dignity can be described as the sense of self-respect and self-worth in individuals.
It mainly seen to incorporate a number of aspects that include their right to feel the basic needs
that include shelter, food as well as personal safety. In the healthcare department, the nursing
professionals consider human dignity to be more focused on the aspects of privacy, autonomy as
well as respect (Papastavrou et al. 2016).
Researchers are of the opinion that being sensitive to the service user’s demographic as
well as special circumstances is immensely critical and significant for the preservation of the
human dignity (Matiti 2015). In many cases, it is seen that older patients suffer from the sense of
loss of dignity when nursing professionals holds stereotypes and negative assumptions about the
capability of the older clients in understanding, remembering and acting upon information.
Therefore, not only for patients like this but also for all kinds of patients, nursing professionals
have the duty to communicate the procedures steps by step even when it might require extra
time.
Dignity is also associated with autonomy. Researchers are of the opinion that every
individuals wants to have certain measures of control about what happens with their bodies and
the ways their destined unfold (Sabatino et al. 2014). Therefore, Human Rights acts instruct
nursing professionals not to restrain their patients as that affects their dignity. Moreover, recent
nursing principles also guide the professionals to provide enough freedom to the patients with
cognitive impairment in making their own decisions and to have their wishes honored.
When dignity is present, every service users feel that they are in control, confident,
valued as well as comfortable. They should also able to make decisions for themselves.
Researchers have seen that when dignity is absent, service users feel devalued and are also seen

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to lack control and comfort. They may feel lack of confidence and develop depression. They feel
humiliated, ashamed and embarrassed. Dignity is applied equally to all those individuals who are
capable and to those who are incapable. All service users have the equal worth of being human
beings and should be treated in ways by which they would be able to feel, think and thereby
behave in relation to their worth and value.
In the clinical scenarios, it is often seen that many of the nursing professionals have
overwhelming knowledge, skills and clinical expertise for treating patients with co-morbid
symptoms but they fail to maintain the dignity of the patients. This affects the satisfaction of the
patient. Nurses should thereby know the different procedures by which they can maintain the
patient dignity. One of the most important strategies is the asking for informed consent. Patients
should be made to know about the interventions that are applied on them, the advantages and
disadvantages and the risks associated with it. Following this, the nurses should ask for consent
and document it before proceeding. Secondly, the nurses should be very careful about the ways
they touch the service users (Jacobs 2016). They have to be gentle and mindful. Nurses need to
be conscious about the feelings of the patient and should never make the patients feel
embarrassed. The nurses should always cover them up and give them privacy.

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References:
Jacobs, B.B., 2016. Respect for human dignity in nursing: Philosophical and practical
perspectives. Canadian Journal of Nursing Research Archive, 32(2).
Matiti, M.R., 2015. Learning to promote patient dignity: An inter-professional approach. Nurse
education in practice, 15(2), pp.108-110.
Papastavrou, E., Efstathiou, G. and Andreou, C., 2016. Nursing students’ perceptions of patient
dignity. Nursing ethics, 23(1), pp.92-103.
Sabatino, L., Stievano, A., Rocco, G., Kallio, H., Pietila, A.M. and Kangasniemi, M.K., 2014.
The dignity of the nursing profession: a meta-synthesis of qualitative research. Nursing
ethics, 21(6), pp.659-672.