Professor Eamon O'Shea:

The training should be given not only to medical professionals but also everyone engaged in this area. Reference was made to the holistic approach to dying.

If our approach to dying is truly holistic it must broadly move beyond the clinical, medical and caring areas into an understanding of what is needed around death.

This debate should be about the living. The living are living until they die and it is about how we create the quality of life and what we consider to be a just, human-rights-based approach to dying, but it must be emphasised and placed in the context of living and how living takes place right up to death. It is up to us to shape that debate. It incorporates pain relief, counselling and bereavement, but it is about how we constitute the quality of life associated with the living as we approach death.