Meeting death on our own terms | DW Documentary

At the end of life, many people end up in a hospital. Whether or not they would prefer to die at home, more than half of the people in Germany die in intensive care units. Some die in nursing homes and a few die in hospices. Why is that? Most people want to die at home. But only very few manage to fall asleep peacefully with their family. Take Ingrid L., who’d been in a coma for three months following a cardiac arrest and was on a ventilator. Her husband was desperately fighting for the doctors to follow her living will and let her die. “It’s a horror! She never wanted to live hooked up to machines for months on end, like that,“ he said. Modern medicine is making it possible to keep people alive for longer and longer. However, hospitals can also earn a lot of money by treating the seriously ill, especially in intensive care units. Intensive care physician Uwe Janssens believes that, when it comes to death and dying, economics often play a key role. People die almost every day in Janssens’ intensive care unit at St. Antonius Hospital in Eschweiler. More and more elderly patients are on ventilators for an indefinite period of time. Doctors, nurses and the hospital’s chaplain meet regularly to discuss ethics: Should a critically ill patient be assisted in dying, or kept alive artificially? What is the aim of therapy? What is the patient’s will? What is medically feasible, what makes sense? Even for doctors, decisions at the end of a patient’s life are never easy. The film touches on a taboo in Western society. How can people be protected from artificially extended morbid illness, yet still receive the medical help they need and want?