A project involving the Irish Hospice Foundation (IHF) and Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital in Drogheda to develop a "hospice philosophy" in a major acute hospital will be revealed today.
Over the next two years the partnership between the IHF and the North Eastern Health Board aims to improve the experience of dying for patients, and allow them have "a good death".
It also wants to address the needs of the bereaved and of hospital staff.
Mr Mervyn Taylor, project manager with the IHF, said that most people who expressed a preference would like to die at home, in their own bed and while asleep. The reality, however, was that 60 per cent of all Irish deaths took place in hospitals or institutions, he said.
"There is no template or book here; this is an extremely comprehensive and ambitious project and a very brave one for the hospital to undertake. It is ambitious because it is comprehensive and it is about all aspects of care and organisational culture."
Every year around 2,500 people die in the north-east region, and of those about 200 die in the Lourdes Hospital.
The hospital is close to Newgrange, the megalithic burial chamber that is illuminated by the rays of the rising sun on the darkest day of the year, and this has been chosen to symbolise the project.
The project will examine in depth the experience of dying in the hospital for a patient and the bereaved from the first point of contact.
"We will look at the physical facilities, and whether they enhance the respect, privacy, dignity and confidentiality of people.
"For example, there can be a lack of space and facilities for confidential conversations with patients and their families," said Mr Taylor.
Hospitals are generally geared towards curative medicine as opposed to palliative care, and according to Dr Doiminic O'Brannagain, consultant in palliative medicine, "we are not simply looking at how an acute hospital manages people dying from predictable diseases but also those who die unpredictably.
"If, for example, you are called to an acute hospital in the middle of the night, you don't know where the ward is or who will greet you along the way. It can alter the human experience of somebody dying in such a situation if there was a designated staff member to meet you and bring you up to the ward, and a doctor to explain what is happening to you in a calm, collective environment as opposed to a buzzing ward."