Resumen

AGUIRRE LANEGRA, Andherson Jhordan. Dehumanization of Clinical Care in Public Hospitals: A Critical Review from a Structural Bioethics Perspective. An. Fac. Cienc. Méd. (Asunción) [online]. 2025, vol.58, n.2, pp.105-115. ISSN 1816-8949.  https://doi.org/10.18004/anales/2025.058.02.105.

In recent years, clinical practice in public hospitals across Latin America has undergone an institutional transformation that, under the banner of efficiency, has troublingly eroded the ethical foundations of care. Adopting a critical perspective, this article seeks to interrogate the dehumanization of clinical practice not as a sporadic failure, but as a symptom of a broader rational, political, and organizational order that has displaced the patient from their position as a moral subject, reducing them to a manageable object within healthcare systems. The analysis contends that this depersonalization of care does not stem from isolated professional shortcomings or ethical lapses, but rather from institutional frameworks that have normalized the subordination of human dignity to performance metrics. In response to this context, the article argues that rethinking healthcare requires more than administrative reform; it calls for a profound reconfiguration of the epistemological and normative foundations of the system, alongside the reclamation of a situated ethics that understands vulnerability as a constitutive feature of the human condition, rather than a managerial inconvenience. Rehumanizing healthcare-understood here as both a political and ethical project-will only be possible through the articulation of a clear-sighted critique of the mechanisms that perpetuate exclusion, coupled with concrete proposals that restore care to its rightful place as a relational, just, and transformative practice.

Palabras clave : Dehumanization; critical bioethics; public health; structural violence; ethics of care.

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