Abstract
The recent technological and therapeutic developments in medicine, especially in critical care, might allow us to maintain artificially alive patients with incurable diseases like cancer. These progresses have lead to discussions about quality of life and euthanasia. Euthanasia is a painless death by applying appropriate care to relieve agony. Euthanasia is called active when euthanasia consists to provide care shortening survival, and passive when treatment is no longer used to prolong survival. It is practically easier in patients with incurable disease not to start a therapeutic procedure than to stop it and thus to perform active euthanasia. Active euthanasia can be direct or indirect: it is indirect when provided care can reduce survival without intention to give death and it is direct when care is given with the intention to reduce survival to abbreviate pain. In Europe, direct active euthanasia is only performed in Holland by some physicians in well defined cases, a law allowing this practice since 1993. Examples of various situations, as any nurse working in an oncological department may have to face, will be discussed during the round-table session in order to allow the nurses to give their opinion on cases where a medical decision on some type of euthanasia has to been taken.
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