Plea regarding rights for the dying
People who are dying deserve more rights than last rites, a leading academic said today.
A national conversation to address the challenges of dying, death and bereavement heard freedom from treatable pain is a human right, he added.
More than 400 people and organisations attended a forum to develop an action plan that will shape public policy on death and the aftermath for decades to come.
Dr Maurice Manning, President of the Irish Human Rights Commission, said the taboo that surrounds death needs to be broken.
“Death itself is inevitable but injustice, poverty and poor end-of-life care need not be,” said Dr Manning in his keynote address.
“The right to full human dignity, which lies at the core of all international human rights treaties, clearly cannot be enjoyed by those suffering unrelieved yet treatable pain. Freedom from treatable pain is fundamental to health care and a fundamental human right.
“Both as citizens and as a society we need to break the taboo that surrounds death and assert clearly that when it come to end-of-life we need more rights than last rites.”
Some 30,000 people die in Ireland each year.
Despite most people wishing to die at home, 74% pass away outside their own homes and 40% die in busy acute hospitals.
Over the next year the public will make submissions to the Forum on End of Life on a number of issues including care for older people, hospitalisation at the expense of home and community-based services, regulation of the funeral industry, the trauma of prenatal or sudden infant death, and the needs of families affected by suicide or homicide.
President Mary McAleese, who opened the event staged by the Irish Hospice Foundation (IHF), said although death will rob us of life, it does not have to rob us of hope, dignity, peace, love, ease and comfort.
She told delegates the hospice movement – which takes patients to a calm space between fragile life and the certainty of death – has showcased huge benefits that flow from a much more holistic approach to dying.
“Death is always going to overcome us, but dying does not need to defeat us or overwhelm us. Thanks to the hospice movement more and more people are finding that out,” said Ms McAleese.
“Through hospice care, hospice in the home and, more recently, the mainstreaming of hospice culture in general hospitals, a much better range of options is opening up for those who face the dying process.
“Hospice characterises dying as a sacred space, to be cultivated with enormous care, compassion, sensitivity and focus.
“There is a determination that the dying person is a living person whose life is going to be made as good as it possibly can be until life is extinguished.”
