Irish Hospice Foundation
Toolkit for Compassionate End-of-Life Care
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Dying Well at Home (DWAH) is a programme to support individuals who wish to die at home and for those caring for them. e programme aims to facilitate end-of-life care by collaborating with, supporting and working with patients, their families and the wide array of healthcare professionals who provide end-of-life and palliative care in the home. Nurses for Night Care, supported by the HSE, continues as part of DWAH, supporting people with non-malignant life-limiting conditions in their final days to die at home. Caru is a quality improvement programme for nursing homes developed by IHF in partnership with the All Ireland Institute of Hospice & Palliative Care (AIIHPC). It enables staff to deliver compassionate, person- centred end-of-life care to residents and their relatives and friends through a programme of training and development workshops, regional network events and ongoing supports. See www.caru.ie for details.
More information on IHF healthcare programmes can be found on www.hospicefoundation.ie
Helpful deʚnitions Here are some key terms and phrases you will come across throughout this toolkit. Terms are presented in alphabetical order and are defined as we understand and use them in IHF. • Bereavement care – Support, information and services available to bereaved people through their families, friends, communities, workplaces, healthcare providers and education systems, regardless of the circumstances of their loss. • End-of-life care/Care at end of life – We use these terms to refer to all aspects of the care relating to dying, death and bereavement provided towards the end of life. In this context,‘end of life’can be from the moment someone receives a life-limiting diagnosis, through the months before death, up to and including the final hours – a continuum rather than a point in time. We use ‘end-of-life care’ to refer to the care of people with advanced life-limiting conditions, for whom death within one to two years is likely, as well as those in the terminal phase of illness. It also encompasses care of the remains of the deceased person. • Life-limiting illness / condition – A condition or illness from which there is no reasonable hope of cure and from which a person is expected to die. • Palliative care – Palliative care is a term for the type of care provided to people with life-limiting conditions by hospices and in many other care settings. It is the term most commonly used by people working in medical or healthcare settings.
e statistics in the graphic at the top of this page are from the following sources: • Vital Statistics Yearly Summary 2022 - CSO - Central Statistics Office • Matthews, S., Pierce, M., Hurley, E., O’Brien Green, S., Johnston, B.M., Normand, C. and May, P. (2021) Dying and death in Ireland: What do we routinely measure and how can we improve? Dublin: Irish Hospice Foundation. • Ashton M. Verdery, Emily Smith-Greenway, Rachel Margolis, and Jonathan Daw (2020), Tracking the reach of COVID-19 kin loss with a bereavement multiplier applied to the United States , https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/ pnas.2007476117
Dying in Ireland 1
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