Dignified dying, death and grieving are the main theme of the Umírání.cz portal, which is a truly exceptional project in the Czech internet environment. In one place it offers professional and lay help and comfort to all who are dying or have someone dying, as well as to professionals working with the dying and their families, and to students. The abundant positive feedback on the portal's pages shows that it is an important and widely used service. The informational, advisory and discussion portal Umírání.cz at http://www.umirani.cz was founded and is run by the hospice civic association Cesta domů. Its creation was driven by experience from the households of families that the association serves through its Home Hospice service. The hospice's care and medical staff repeatedly encountered people—patients, caregivers and the bereaved—who were not only poorly informed but also lonely and helpless. And because hospice care is available only to Prague patients, the association decided to process its experience and provide help via the website to people across the entire Czech Republic. The portal was created in 2004 within the EU Phare project – Support for Active Life of Seniors, and it set out to focus on terminally ill people, their caregivers, and all those who have someone dying or who have died.
Listing everything a reader can find on the site would take a long time. The portal is packed with detailed information and guides, people's experiences and stories, recordings of conferences and lectures, and presentations that readers can download. All free of charge except for the books from Cesta domů's publishing activity. But even those are, from my perspective, sold at a symbolic price. For those who do not find the necessary information in the site's content, an online counseling service is available, where a team of experts from various professions answers questions. The questions from users are very diverse. You will come across questions about the course of illness and care for the dying, but also purely practical ones such as how to arrange a widow's or orphan's pension or how to arrange a funeral.
The necessary information is found here not only by lay caregivers, but also by professionals who focus on care for the dying and their bereaved. „The Umírání.cz portal is for me an important and quality source of experience and information. It helps me find suitable ways of working with clients,“ said Radka Adamcová, a social worker at the Ostrava Home Hospice Ondrášek, for the journal Sociální práce/Sociálna práca.
The portal is not only for passive reception of information. Visitors can join discussions and contribute their two cents, whether in the form of advice and answers, or by starting and developing a discussion on a particular topic. The overview of discussions shows that most participants engage in the topic of Grief and Mourning, where grieving survivors most often share their experiences after the death of a loved one. Visitors also seek ways to cope with the impending death of a family member or a close person.
However, the discussions on the portal's pages also show that death and dying are still shrouded in a number of myths and evoke contradictory emotions in people. In my opinion, this was best captured by a contributor named Tamara, who wrote: „In our society, most people do not want to talk about death, as if death were something improper that does not belong to life. Memento mori – remember death. This well-known phrase should accompany us every day, so that we may be more tolerant, loving, so that we do not harm anyone (if we do not want to help someone). Death is the only certainty that awaits us in life; we must learn to die and to live.“ And the website http://www.umirani.cz offers a helping hand in this.
The report was published in the journal Sociální práce/Sociálna práca, No. 2/2010, Social Work and the Fight against Poverty http://www.socialniprace.cz