Pr?vo: Most Czechs want to die at home, only few do | Prague Monitor

?TK |

30 January 2013

Prague, Jan 29 (CTK) - Most Czechs or 85 percent want to die at home but only one-fifth of them can really see their wish come true since the death and dying have been pushed to the margin of society, the daily Pravo writes yesterday.

According to statistics, some 60 percent of Czechs die in hospital, about 9 percent in other health care institutions and another 6 percent in social care homes, Pravo says.

It points to various reasons for this situation.

The health care system is used to fight for life in any case even though the patient's condition is hopeless.

Death is not being discussed much in society either for fears of it or because people do not know how to cope with and react to it, Pravo writes.

This confused feeling is also reflected in funeral ceremonies, it adds.

Though psychologists consider the funeral a clear and necessary final step for the survivors that enables them to pay their last respects to their dead, the number of funeral ceremonies in the country has been decreasing. About one-third of the dead are buried without a funeral, Pravo says.

One of the reasons may be the fact that people do not have enough money for it. However, experts do not share this opinion, recalling that the funeral costs approximately equal a national average monthly pay in the Czech Republic, which is some 24,300 crowns.

Olga Nesporova, who focuses on these issues at the Labour and Social Affairs Research Institute, recalls that funerals had considerably simplified and lost their ceremonial character with the decline of the church's importance under the communist regime.

Moreover, the predominant form of burial is cremation, which has strengthened this trend, Pravo writes.

Funerals have become more and more formal and empty in terms of symbols, and this is why many people consider them useless.

Funeral homes, too are to blame for the situation since they do not offer any new ideas. Besides, they cannot advertise their services, Nesporova said.

Health care workers have taken control of the death, which has become more or less technical matter, she told Pravo.

However, people are less and less capable of coping with dying morally and ethically, Pravo writes.

It recalls that the first hospices that offer spiritual and psychological support to dying people were established in the Czech Republic in the 1990s.

The offer of assistants to help the family to cope with the death and arrange a funeral and other formalities emerged only recently.

According to psychologists, as Czechs do not speak about death, most of them are not prepared for it, they do not express their wishes in this respect and let it up to their relatives who often do not know what to do, Pravo writes.

($=19.116 crowns)

Copyright 2011 by the Czech News Agency (?TK). All rights reserved.
Copying, dissemination or other publication of this article or parts thereof without the prior written consent of ?TK is expressly forbidden. The Prague Daily Monitor and Monitor CE are not responsible for its content.

Source: http://praguemonitor.com/2013/01/30/pr%C3%A1vo-most-czechs-want-die-home-only-few-do

BBC Dick Morris Daily Show provisional ballot npr rush limbaugh rush limbaugh