It is often a community based role, aiming to help families cope with death, recognizing it as a natural and important part of life.
One of the first movements was started in New York in 2000, a volunteer program focused on pairing so-called "doulas" with terminally ill people.
The volunteers went through training on both clinical and spiritual aspects, including, but not limited to, the complexities of end of life health care, physical issues like incontinence and disorientation, and hope in the face of death.
The basis of the case is that Louise Aerts, the executive director of the College of Midwives, claims that the term "midwife" is specifically reserved for the traditional sense of the word about birth.
"[9] The role of a death midwife is educate and empower families to exercise their innate right to care for their own dead.
Death midwives or doulas "provide emotional, spiritual, and physical support at an intensely personal and crucial time.
Doulas also guide and support loved ones through the last days of life and ease the suffering of grief in its early stages".
Another reason people are attracted to this field is that "they want the contact, the involvement and they are drawn to the mission - making sure someone is not facing this [death process] alone".
However, since there is no centralised organisation for death doulas the training involved often varies by location causing inconsistencies within the role.
These often involve training spanning multiple weeks similarly to the private programs, however, they are often more related to palliative care and putting the terminally ill patient in a more comfortable situation through clinical means and mental health counseling rather than focusing so much on the spiritual and emotional support aspect.
[7] Although still in the early stages, a number of public, accredited, Canadian post-secondary institutions are now offering training to death doulas.
Recently the term death doula has been coined to refer to a trained person who provides a dying individual and their family with assistance and resources.
This can be carried out through the organisation International End of Life Doula Association (INELDA), which provides training sessions across four countries.
[20] Other environmentally sustainable methods of final disposition are being developed, including human composting, also known as "soil transformation"[21] "recomposition".