Yvonne Dauer speaks with Bundestag member Emmi Zeulner about hospice and palliative care policy. Zeulner describes how personal family experiences and her work during her studies on a palliative care ward shaped her understanding of support at the end of life.
For her, good palliative care means reliable support for patients and families at any time of day or night, independent of where someone lives, and with medical, nursing and spiritual needs considered together. She explains that Germany has moved closer to this goal since specialized outpatient palliative care was legally anchored in 2007 and since the Hospice and Palliative Care Act created further structures.
Zeulner emphasizes that political decisions must be tested against reality on the ground. In her work she visits hospices, palliative wards and nursing homes to learn whether measures decided in Berlin actually reach patients and where improvements are still needed. Further networking between sectors, more low-threshold services, stronger hospice culture in nursing homes and multiprofessional palliative services in hospitals are among the next steps she considers important.
The interview also discusses the relationship between palliative care and wishes to die. Zeulner notes that such wishes are often connected to fear, loss of control and suffering. Palliative care can reduce fear of a painful death through pain relief and psychosocial and spiritual support, but there remain rare cases in which even palliative medicine cannot remove the wish to die.
For Zeulner, palliative care is above all an attitude toward other human beings. It respects medical limits rather than exhausting every possible intervention, and its goal is to accompany the dying person and bring the greatest possible relief. Spiritual and philosophical questions cannot be managed by law in a standardized way, but political action can create the structures in which people feel supported as individuals.
The conversation closes by widening the view: debates about palliative care and assisted dying are also debates about loneliness, social pressure and the way society deals with vulnerability. Dying and death must not remain hidden; they are part of life and must again become part of social awareness.
