• The Korean Society of Law and Medicine
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• v.25 no.1
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• pp.193-222
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• 2024

From a global trend, discussions on the patient's death with dignity are gradually progressing from the issue of withdrawal of life-sustaining treatment to the issue of whether to allow assisted death and its requirements. Several states in the United States and Western European countries such as Canada, Belgium, and the Netherlands have institutionalized treatment to accelerate the time of death through the assistance of doctors. In France, after a long period of raising and reviewing issues, discussions on related legislation are taking place at a slower pace than in other European countries. In France, social discussions and legislative attempts on death with dignity have been actively conducted since the late 20th century. The Leonetti Act of 2005 prohibited the continuation of meaningless treatment against the will of patients, and after the Clay-Leonetti Act of 2016, it was legalized to administer intensive and continuous sedatives to patients until death. However, unlike many neighboring European countries, treatment that speeds up the time of death itself is still prohibited in France, even if the patient wants. As the existential and universal question of whether to allow dying patients to die painlessly with the help of a doctor has recently emerged as an important issue, a number of lawmakers have submitted legislation to legalize assisted death. This paper examines the legislative process developed in relation to patients' rights to dignified death in France, and compares and reviews French legislation that attempts to legalize assisted death with the amendment to the Korean Life-Sustaining Treatment Act.

• Journal of Korean Academy of Nursing
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• v.41 no.3
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• pp.313-324
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• 2011

Purpose: The study was done to develop a dignified dying scale for Korean adults. Methods: The process included construction of a conceptual framework, generation of initial items, verification of content validity, selection of secondary items, preliminary study, and extraction of final items. The participants were 428 adults who lived in one of 3 Korean metropolitan cities: Seoul, Daegu, and Busan. Item analysis, factor analysis, criterion related validity, and internal consistency were used to analyze the data. Data collection was done from March to June 2010. Results: Thirty items were selected for the final scale, and categorized into 5 factors explaining 54.5% of the total variance. The factors were labeled as maintaining emotional comfort (10 items), arranging social relationship (9 items), avoiding suffering (3 items), maintaining autonomous decision making (4 items), and role preservation (4 items). The scores for the scale were significantly correlated with personal meanings of death scale. Cronbach's alpha coefficient for the 30 items was .92. Conclusion: The above findings indicate that the dignified dying scale has a good validity and reliability when used with Korean adults.

• Journal of Hospice and Palliative Care
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• v.4 no.1
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• pp.57-67
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• 2001

Purpose : The purpose of this study was to identify attitudes of hospice volunteers toward care of for terminally ill patients. Method : This was a descriptive study with a sample of 84 adults who were registered for a hospice volunteer education program at Severence Hospice Center. The Frommelt (FATCOD) scale on attitudes toward the care of the dying (Cronbach alpha=.778) and an open ended questions on "what if you only have 6 months to live" were used to collect the data. The data was analyzed using SPSS/W and content analysis. Results : 1) The hospice volunteers were mostly female, with an average age of 45 years, half of them were college graduates and their religious preference was Protestant. 2) The participants of this study demonstrated positive attitudes to care for the dying which is in coherence with hospice philosophy and principles. However they indicated difficulties in maintaining close relationships with people who are dying, and in communicating and sharing, and encouraging those who are dying to express their feelings. In the open ended questions, they identified that their most important issues would be guilt feelings toward their children, family concerns, and the burden of unfinished business in their lives. They also identified the fear of pain in the dying process and fear of the afterlife. The care they would like to receive was to have peace of mind, have a good listener, spiritual counselling, and pain relief and to be respected as a human being. The source of strength would be faith in God and they would like to overcome their of dying. The FATCOD scale has limitation in describing and identifying the need and attitude toward the care of the dying revisions were made. Conclusion : We all are the potential clients for the hospice rare. In a hospice volunteer education program, communication and interpersonal skill are essential. The fear of dying, afterlife, concerns about family with children, and human dignity are major concerns in hospice and palliative care.

• Journal of The Korea Institute of Healthcare Architecture
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• v.14 no.1
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• pp.39-48
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• 2008

Well-dying is as important as Well-Being because dying is also a natural part of life. Recently, due to the change of lifestyles, cancer, AIDS and other chronic diseases cause drastic increase of mortality rate. Needs for hospice services are growing as many terminal patients interested in quality of life during their end of life period. They want calm and dignity in case process as well as pain-relieving. However, there is not many researches on the architectural planning of hospice facilities and their service system as well as government regulations. This study focuses on the German hospice facilities which have developed advanced models through researches on service contents and architectural planning. The purpose of this study is to provide fundamental data for designing hospice facilities through analyzing 7 cases of German hospice facilities with different characteristics.

• Journal of Hospice and Palliative Care
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• v.24 no.2
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• pp.130-134
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• 2021

In the era of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), social distancing and strict visitation policies at hospitals have made it difficult for medical staff to provide high-quality end-of-life (EOL) care to dying patients and their families. There are various issues related to EOL care, including psychological problems of patients and their families, difficulties in EOL decision-making, the complicated grief of the bereaved family, moral distress, and exhaustion of medical staff. In relation to these issues, we aimed to discuss practical considerations in providing high-quality EOL care in the COVID-19 pandemic. First, medical staff should discuss advance care planning as early as possible and use the parallel planning strategy. Second, medical staff should play a role in facilitating patient-family communication. Third, medical staff should actively and proactively evaluate and alleviate dying patients' symptoms using non-verbal communication. Lastly, medical staff should provide care for family members of the dying patient, who may be particularly vulnerable to post-bereavement problems in the COVID-19 era. Establishing a system of screening high-risk individuals for complicated grief and connecting them to bereavement support services might be considered. Despite the challenging and limited environment, providing EOL care is essential for patients to die with dignity in peace and for the remaining family to return to life after the loved one's death. Efforts considering the practical issues faced by all medical staff and healthcare institutions caring for dying patients should be made.

• Korean Journal of Health Education and Promotion
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• v.24 no.1
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• pp.109-125
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• 2007

How an elderly people meets death is the matter of how he has lived his life. It is very important for an elderly people at the last step of his life to re-light up life and to meet death with dignity. The purpose of this study is to investigate where fear or anxiety of death come from among the four dimensins of death anxiety and to compare the differenced between the elderly group and non-elderly group, For this research, the 473 of the subjects from 20 to 80 years old attending social welfare center and community areas in Seoul have been questionned. The summary for the study mentioned the following: First, the overall scores of death anxiety, in the non-aged group, gender and religiosity are important factors affecting the decrease of death anxiety, On the other hand, in the aged group, self-respect, death readiness and number of friends are significant factors. Secondly, for death anxiety of self, age and spouse are significant relationships among non-aged group and gender, death readiness and number of friends for aged-group. In the dying of self, the following each three significant variables: gender, self-respect and spouse among non-aged group and gender, self-respect and number of friends among aged group. In death anxiety of others, age, view on next world and spouse are best predictor for non-aged group. Finally, family-relationship, self-respect and spouse are significant factors for aged group. In dying of others, only one factors are influenced for non-aged group, on the other hand, gender, self-respect and death readiness are important factors for aged group. There remains the need for more detailed examination into the nature of this relationship and the extent to which core components strongly affecting the above subscales.

• Journal of Digital Convergence
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• v.13 no.12
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• pp.413-422
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• 2015

This study is to grasp fundamental data to prepare the policy about death with dignity(DwD) by grasping perception type of the middle-aged about DwD. 32 middle-ages test Q-sort with 30 statements which is related to DwD. The result of analysis shows that subjective perception types are permission type, opposition type, and limited permission type. First, 'permission type' indicates that DwD by self-determination of patients should be accepted; it is necessary to patients with extreme pain. Second, 'opposition type' insists that there will be more people dying unfairly; a trend to make light of human life could be in everywhere if DwD is permitted. Third, 'limited permission type' agrees with permitting DwD but insists on preparing specific legal system before that. The subject, DwD, itself seems not to be able to draw a complete agreement from people, but national opinions should be reflected during the process of DwD system.

• Korean Journal of Hospice Care
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• v.2 no.2
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• pp.1-16
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• 2002

Hospice can not only help the dying persons to maintain the high quality of life and facing the death in comfortable and peaceful state, but also the bereaved family to relieve the grief and sufferings. We investigated the work of hospice performed by church base from March 2000 until recently and reported the results dividing them into three parts. 1)The application of resources in church to administration, education, nursing delivery of hospice in the aspects of management. 2)Spiritual and postmortal management relating hospice nursing and funeral in hospice practice. 3)Case report of hospice and the patients situation(5 in average a month). The expected effects of hospice practice using the resources in church are as follows. 1)Hospice practice can provide the highly qualified persons with the opportunities to do voluntary services and find their lives worth living. Consequently hospice contributes to the spreading of the volunteering culture. 2)The volunteers in hospice can grow mature spiritually and get interpersonal relationships among the volunteers. Doyle. D., Geoflrey.W.C., & Macdonald. N.(1988). Oxford Textbook of Palliative Medicine(2nd ed). New York :Oxford University Press. Woodruff. R.(1996). Palliative Medicine(2nd ed). Melburn: Asperula Pty Ltd. 3)Through the hospice activity, church can practice and show the moral. 4)The volunteers in hospice can make a organization with a hope to be a beautiful community in church. 5)The patients and their families can enjoy the high quality of life through the holistic care provided by 33 nursing practical items of hospice. 6)'Hospice newsletter' can be a useful vehicle to provide readers with hope and encouragement through the stories of the patient and the volunteers. The persons unaware of the hospice can be contacted with hospice by this 'Hospice newsletter'. 7)Irrespective of the economic status, all patients are served equally that hospice can contribute to dying with dignity and the equality of human being.

• Journal of Hospice and Palliative Care
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• v.20 no.2
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• pp.100-110
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• 2017

Purpose: We explored Koreans' perception of the meaning of death with dignity that Korean people. Methods: A phenomenological research methodology was applied. A total of 13 participants were sampled based on their age and gender. Participants were interviewed in depth from September 2015 through February 2016. Colaizzi's phenomenological analysis method was used for data analysis. To establish the validity of the study, we evaluated its realistic value, applicability, consistency and neutrality of the qualitative evaluation criteria of Lincoln and Guba. Results: Koreans' perception of death with dignity was structured as 19 themes, nine theme clusters and four categories. The four categories were "comfortable death", "good death", "resolving problems before death", and "death with good reputation". The theme clusters were "death without pain", "death submitting to one's fate", "death that is not ugly", "leaving good memories to others", "dying in a way we want", "death after proper settling of things", "dealing with chronic resentment before death", "death after living a good life", and "death with recognition". Conclusion: For Koreans, death with dignity meant not burdening others, settling things right and leaving good memories to their families and friends. Such perceptions can be applied to hospice care for terminally ill patients.

• Journal of Korean Critical Care Nursing
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• v.10 no.1
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• pp.41-50
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• 2017

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to describe what critical care nurses perceived about life-sustaining treatment at end of life. Methods: A qualitative content analysis method was utilized. The unit of analysis was interview text obtained from fifty critical care nurses of a general hospital. Results: Seven categories in two content areas were abstracted. In the negative perception area, the following five categories were abstracted: patients' suffering, dying with damaged dignity, patients' isolation from family members, regret about choosing life-sustaining treatment, and family members' burden. In the positive perception area, the following two categories were abstracted: willingness to sustain life and duty as family members. Conclusions: Nurses have better competencies pertaining to understanding patients' responses and suffering than any other health care professions do. Nurses should play an important role in advocating for patients and their family in the process of end-of-life care decision making.