HASAccompanying life to its natural end is an essential responsibility of our society. If we all have a singular experience of death and personal convictions, there are fundamental principles that bring us together and that we must discuss to guarantee to the French, in any case, a dignified and peaceful end of life.
The latter is not fully ensured today and the “malemort” feeds on the shortage of support and care personnel, the unequal access to palliative care, the insufficient consideration of caregivers, the too often exclusively medical view of doctors, the difficulty of hearing people and obtaining their consent, and the taboo that still exists around death. We must also vigorously combat the discrimination that daily affects the elderly and people with disabilities. They lead to their effacement or to reduce them to silence, all the more easily as these people find themselves, at the end of their life, in a situation of great vulnerability.
The national debate on the end of life offers us the possibility of questioning the collective choices that we envisage for the hospital, the nursing homes and the home. It is time for us to reacquaint ourselves with death and accept that it is part of our lives and our politics.
Domiciliary logic
Within the board of the National Solidarity Fund for Autonomy, we have a strong ambition, which we have formulated in 26 proposals: that of developing home support policies and offering intermediate solutions between home and Ehpad, guarantors of the domiciliary logic, that is to say where one feels at home, less isolation and insecurity, and where one lives in dignity and citizenship. It is certainly by improving the living conditions of all elderly and disabled people in our country that we will be able to better support the end of life.
This involves increasing the number of professionals at the bedside of people, better coordinating and training them. To go beyond a still too sanitary vision of the end of life, training should be open to the human and social sciences, and concern all care and support professionals. We also propose that the death of people should not immediately put an end to benefits and the status of carer, in order to allow home care staff to accompany families to the end, and to do their own bereavement of the person being cared for.
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