Concurrent with a nursing shortage and the increasing indigent requiring care in Germany preliminary discussions are emerging about quality of life and the rights of this socioeconomic group. This contribution shows which effects such a discussion may have on the care of a most defenseless segment of our society. It counters those who deny these rights and opposes their view of human dignity, which is characterized by categories of self-consciousness and intellectual ability. According to the christian view, dignity is a transcendental state and cannot be categorized as an empirical matter by virtue of its presence or absence. Exaggerated ideals of health have overshadowed realities of incurable disease, lingering illness, and dying, and is easily leading us to discount such people as being "unworthy to live". According to the view presented nursing carers are valued.

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[Clinics for terminally ill and dying patients?].

Hospitals are almost exclusively organized for the purpose of technical control of illness and death. They hardly fulfill the needs of chronical ill people and those being dying. It is therefore necessary to provide for them particular hospitals? There are several reasons against: in order to keep a humane praxis and atmosphere you need more personnel than you do in common hospitals. Therefore no reduction of costs could be expected. Furthermore it will be difficult to find enough qualified people because the psychic and physical stress of the team is very hard and because regular change of the personnel is not as easily possible as it is in common hospitals. The medical facilities for controlling pain could be not sufficient in those institutions. The tendency of turning the whole section of care for people being incurable ill, needing permanent care and being dying into a ghetto would increase all the negative moral consequences. Therefore there are important objections against the organisation of specific hospitals for dying people.

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