Immersion in the palliative care department of the Rennes University Hospital: a unit in which life takes away the desire to die

Have one last project to end your life well. The end-of-life bill, in addition to assistance in dying, provides for a ten-year strategy to develop the French offer of palliative care. Units in France which support patients in a context increasingly focused on pain management, care and even life-oriented projects. Europe 1 went to the palliative care unit of the Rennes University Hospital which around fifty health professionals operate.

16 XXL rooms between the spa and wellness areas, lounges furnished like at home and above all no hospital hours in this unit managed by Doctor Vincent Morel. “In the palliative care unit, what can be paradoxical is that it is a place of life. Here we will densify the time that remains to live and we will ensure that it has meaning. Our whole challenge is to put our expertise and our empathy at the service of a patient who wants to carry out a project for the days they have left to live,” he explains.

Give the patient enough time to choose their end of life

Photos of the latest life projects are displayed on the walls with, for example, a patient in a wheelchair who will go to Cancale to see the sea one last time. Tomorrow, another will eat at McDonald’s with her son. Simple joys which make Dr Géraldine Texier say that the demand for euthanasia remains exceptional. “When the demand exists, it is done with the expertise of palliative care support when the symptoms diminish. There are less than five per year in a service like ours which will maintain this type of demand,” she indicates.

Psychologists, nursing staff, health executives, all agree on this imponderable: giving the patient enough time to choose their end of life.