Professor Eamon O'Shea:

I will be brief, because my colleagues have covered most of this. One issue that came up was the uniqueness of death and how each death is different. This is critical to maintaining the personhood about which we spoke, particularly with people who have cognitive impairment. Again, I stress that particular groups need special attention in terms of the uniqueness of each death and the need for services to recognise that. In respect of how communities are changing, particularly with regard to age and family structures, a good death requires communities of the living. By that, I mean that we need living and vibrant communities in order for all of us to die well. There must be some public visibility around death and that understanding of death to support the private grief that is associated with it. This is something we need to think about in terms of how we organise health and social care services and how we integrate voluntary, statutory and family views about death. It is critical to keep that community focus on the way we think about a holistic view of health rather than a clinical one all the time. In respect of costs, we need serious scrutiny of how we spend money in the last weeks of life in terms of making good decisions about where best to allocate that money, because we do not know whether some of that expenditure might need to go to other areas that embrace some of these broader social, personhood and holistic elements of life. To make good decisions about where we spend money, we need more information about how we allocate these resources.