Table 3.

Top Ten Tips Palliative Care Clinicians Should Know About Dignity-Conserving Practice

Tip 1: Dignity is affirmed through specific and consistent clinician behaviors that can be taught and learned, and adapted to the clinician's practice. Tip 2: Dignity is preserved, promoted, and protected, in part, by the nature of the overall care setting. Tip 3: Every person experiences dignity and indignity differently—it is the clinician's responsibility to find out what dignity means to each person, here and now. Tip 4: Dignity-conserving care can relieve suffering by addressing loneliness, desire for hastened death, and existential distress, among other challenges. Tip 5: Dignity-based palliative care affirms patients' unique qualities and worth, thus supporting self-actualization, autonomy, and critical values. Tip 6: Several simple, brief, and useful tools to support the person's sense of dignity have been developed and show beneficial effects. Tip 7: Dignity therapy has a positive impact on the emotional and social well-being of patients and those receiving legacy documents. Tip 8: The Patient Dignity Question can serve as a core palliative care practice to anchor the relationship with patients in what is most important to them as human beings. Tip 9: Dignity-conserving care takes many forms throughout a disease course and must be adapted to the person, population, culture, and context. Tip 10: Dignity-conserving practice can help dismantle palliative care clinicians' biases, thus enhancing the tone of care and maintaining a person-centered lens.