A new campaign has highlighted the need for better pastoral and spiritual care in hospitals to help terminally ill patients face death with dignity. The Irish Hospice Foundation (IHF) has launched the first ever national audit of end-of-life care, to support hospitals in their efforts to develop services for dying patients and for their families.
Prompt
Fr Bryan Nolan, Development Coordinator with the IHF Hospice Friendly Hospitals Programme (HfH) says the audit will act as a prompt to help hospital staff look at death and dying from a human as well as medical perspective.
''I see the audit as a powerful tool for chaplains to highlight the fact that spiritual needs should be looked at sooner,'' he says.
''Chaplains are usually only brought in at the last minute, when the patient is dying. But chaplaincy and pastoral care is all about building up a relationship with the patient and accompanying them on their final journey. ''We want to take the best principles of hospice care and bring it into hospitals so that patients are looked after in the same way.''
Survey
The first ever national survey on death and dying in 2004 revealed that over 80 per cent believed that hospital care for people who were dying or terminally ill needed improvement, and nearly 40 per cent believed it needed urgent or considerable improvement.
Shelagh Twomey, Deputy-Manager of the HfH Programme, stated: ''The experience of the HfH Programme is that hospital management and staff share public concerns about end-of-life care, and are constantly seeking to make improvements.
This audit is an ambitious undertaking of national importance.
Core activity
''While caring for the dying is actually a core activity of hospitals, no audit has ever been undertaken in Ireland. Yet an audit is a valuable method of learning about the quality of service in any healthcare organisation.''
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(Source: IC)