[Helping patients to die--an ethical challenge to nursing care and to its institutional framework]

The current discussion about the moral legitimacy of euthanasia is primarily concerned with the question of to what extent passive and active forms of euthanasia (limited legalized practice in the Netherlands) can actually be distinguished from one another. From a nursing perspective this passive/active distinction appears in a completely different way: with regard to varied conditions which would have to be fulfilled to favour another "culture of dying", in which the desire to terminate life no longer appears as the drastic alternative to a principally curative or maximum therapeutic oriented care system for the afflicted. For this purpose, new orientations within the nursing professions which equally combine instrumental, psychosocial, institutional and educational aspects, are necessary. Applied to problems of euthanasia, questions of a fundamental ethical structure in nursing appear within an enlarged framework.