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Greater collaboration between healthcare assistants and volunteers who work in hospices was the central theme of a meeting that took place recently in Erlangen. Organised by German Caritas and by its Protestant sister organisation, Diakonie, the meeting arranged for the creation of a diocesan workgroup with the aim of linking assistance to the terminally ill with work in hospices. The gathering was attended by around 120 volunteers from the two confessional groups and from the hospice associations. “Our hospices are becoming ever more houses of death”, observed Dietmar Horchheimer, director of Diakonischen Werkes of Bamberg-Forchheim, who explained the problem of an up to 50% increase in mortality in the organisations’ hospices during 2003. In his talk, pastor Don Frank Kittelberger presented a project that has been running since 2001 and aims to improve the culture of dying and death in five mission hospices in Munich. The director of diocesan Caritas, Bernhard Simon, expressed his hope that people who accompany others as they die will receive greater recognition. Do not abandon those who work in the sector, he said, they must become “a fundamental aspiration of the Churches” , so they feel “that their service – be it as professionals, volunteers or because they have a personal relationship with the dying person – is valuable not only for the dying but also for those who remain”.
