Retirement and nursing homes persons to pass away in familiar surroundings. If the project on Hospice Culture and Palliative Care in Nursing Homes is not established in nursing homes and there is a shortage of staff anyway, persons in the final phase of their lives are often moved to hospitals. The NPM is of the opinion that this can constitute a violation of human rights. In order to preserve the quality of life and human dignity until the end, the NPM holds the view that the goal must be to implement and sustainably maintain Hospice Culture and Palliative Care in Nursing Homes project throughout Austria. At the beginning of 2017, 129 retirement and nursing homes in eight Laender had applied the Hospice Culture and Palliative Care in Nursing Homes project. Home operators in individual Laender have made commendable efforts in this regard in recent years and have specially trained their staff. Corresponding initiatives have thus been implemented in two thirds of all state nursing homes in Lower Austria (33 out of 48). However, this is still far from a nationwide implementation in 850 nursing homes all over Austria. But this could change. In addition to care funding, an increased budget of EUR 18 million per year has been made available for the hospice and palliative care area for the financial equalisation (redistribution of income) period 2017 to 2021, whereby the Federal Government, Laender and public social insurance carriers will share a third of this respectively. No nationwide implementation The NPM states that Nils Muižnieks, the Commissioner for Human Rights of the Council of Europe, sees a serious violation of human rights in the denial of palliative care. He expressed this in January 2018 as follows: “The importance of palliative care as an integral part of health services and its denial as a human rights violation are being increasingly recognised at the international level. Special Rapporteurs of the UN on Torture and on Health stated that the denial of pain relief causing severe pain and suffering may amount to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment. Within the Council of Europe, the Recommendation of the Committee of Ministers on the human rights of older persons devoted a chapter to palliative care, providing that ‘any older person who is in need of palliative care should be entitled to access it without undue delay, in a setting which is consistent with his or her needs and preferences, including at home and in long-term care settings’.” (Source: https://www.coe.int/en/web/commissioner/-/the-right-of-older-persons-todignity-and-autonomy-in-care). Denial of palliative care is a human rights violation The commissions visited facilities which still lack spatial or other conditions to enable residents to receive palliative support in the final phase of their lives and bid their relatives farewell in intimacy. In this context, a nursing home was visited in Styria which only offered shared rooms and had no rooms available where the relatives of the dying could spend the night. Staff shortages on night duty made it impossible to spend time with the dying. Missing condition for palliative care 33