Reviews should take place between doctors and families following a death in hospitals and care institutions in a bid to explore the patient and family's experience of end-of-life care.
Some 30,000 people die each year in Ireland and more than more than six out of 10 people die in hospital or institutional care such as hospices.
Denis Doherty, chairman of the Irish Hospice Foundation
Speaking at a one-day conference in Dublin entitled Hope and Opportunit, Hospice Principle and Hospice Practice, Mr Denis Doherty, chairman of the Irish Hospice Foundation (IHF), said that there was no system in place to review hospital deaths with bereaved families.
He said introducing such a system, including family feedback, could be a valuable learning experience for medical, nursing and other staff.
National and international experts attended the conference to explore how to improve end-of-life care for patients, families and staff in Irish hospitals.
Mr Doherty said: "The HfH Programme aims to put hospice principles into hospital practice.
"Crucial to the success of the Programme is the development of a framework of patient-focused standards by 2010.
We must ensure that these standards do not become boxes for people to tick. People must appreciate that death is not a once-off event but a process. We only get one chance to get it right," he said.
The conference heard that international research in the 1980s had found a "medicalisation" of the dying process with people's inability to communicate or empathise with the dying person.
Patients in the last days of their life received less nursing attending and were isolated in the ward system.
Irish research carried out in 1999 which examined the experiences of patients and their relatives during their last year of life found that the general care issues in the hospitals system could be radically improved.