The Necessity of Preserving Human Dignity of Patients in Intensive Care Units: Letter to the Editor

The concept of human dignity has always been at the center of attention of scholars and philosophers throughout the history of human life. This concept has been emphasized in all religions and in fact, has been the endeavor of all religious leaders to defend and preserve the inherent dignity of man. The preservation of human dignity is one of the basic principles of human rights. The World Health Organization (WHO), in its 1994 declaration, considered the importance of dignity to be an important factor in improving the health of patients and considered the right to give an informed consent, access to health services, the confidentiality of information, and privacy as important (1(.
The concept of human dignity has always been considered in the nursing profession. Thus, the essence and essential nature of nursing care is to protect the patient's human dignity (2).
 
This concept has been first emphasized in the Nurses Ethical Charter by the American Nurses Association (2001) and in the Nursing Ethics Code of the Islamic Republic of Iran (2011) as one of the fundamental values ​​of the nursing profession. So that "all human beings have high human dignity and must be respected. Therefore, all patients should be respected by health care workers, regardless of their social, economic, and cultural status (3, 4). Despite recent attention to the concept of dignity, the term remains a vague, complex and interpretable concept and has not yet been given a comprehensive and specific definition by consensus experts. On the other hand, the concept of dignity overlaps with other human values ​​including privacy, respect, and independence (1).