[The role of pychosocial care and bereavement counselling]

Within their psychosocial problems, badly ill patients and their families often feel left alone by caregivers, as there are physicians and nurses. It is the caregiver's task to allow patients to communicate all their feelings, not seeking to mollify, or banish them by attempting to cheer up or distract the patient. Sharing means to communicate the patient's and his family's anger, sorrows, social pains, spiritual questions, anxiety, as well as their hope and special aims to reach. The first step for the caregiver is, to set up a profound psychosocial diagnosis and to establish some kind of a hierarchy among all the needs. Both of them, caregiver and patient have to find out their primary goals and challenges in the process of dying and come to an agreement. Communicating with a dying patient and being with him in the last period of his life presupposes a deepened communication with oneself and the own hopes and fears.