we are pleased to announce that after a long time, the current and the next issue of Kharón are sponsored again by the National Cultural Fund of Hungary. Winning the tender opened for supporting Internet journals means that the decision makers recognized our journal’s quality and mission.
This issue is partly thematic, since our intention was to provide a review of our hospice volunteer movement. The hospice movement has been existing since 1991 in Hungary, and volunteers have been employed since the very first year of its existence. (The writer of these lines became a volunteer at the Hungarian Hospice Foundation in 1992 at the founder’s, Alaine Polcz's request.) The training courses for volunteers were started already in that year in the National Institute of Oncology, in cooperation with the National Association of Cancer Patients. There were not many people in our movement at that time, but since then, a new generation has grown up, and more and more people take up this difficult but beautiful task among patients at the end of their lives and their families. In 2015, 249 volunteers worked in hospices at national level.
The studies of three young authors are published in this topic. Kinga Farkas, voluntary coordinator of the Hungarian Hospice-Palliative Associaton, studies the role of volunteers of hospice services in Hungary at national level; she also mentions the factors hindering the development of the voluntary movement in this field; and the reasons why the national volunteer agency system of the national organization does not really work. Marica Wild chose this research area as a volunteer of the St. László Hospital in Budapest: she puts the volunteer management practices of hospice providers in Budapest under the microscope. For her, the main tasks are the establishment of the official, written procedure, and the definition of tasks and skills in the contracts. The third study has a personal tone; its author is Cecília Molnár, volunteer of the Tábitha Hospice House for Children and Young Adults. Her article is based on her personal experiences, and presents the difficulties that volunteers have to face with, the pleasure and success they might be rewarded with as a children’s hospice volunteer. Hereby, I would call your attention to a similar study in this topic we published in the previous issue of our journal written by Kinga Velkey, it sums up the purposes, development and experiences of the school’s voluntary program in cooperation with the Erzsébet Hospice in Miskolc, Hungary.
Since the area of hospice is dominating this issue, the article of the psychologist and music therapist Dr. János Kollár seems appropriate here as well: he wrote a comprehensive study on the positive effects of music in hospice services.
At the end of our issue you can read two book reviews by Dr. András Zelena (on Own Death by Péter Nádas and A vége (The End) by Attila Bartis).
I wish you a happy reading of all of these pioneering pieces of work!
Dr. Katalin Hegedűs
Editor-in-chief