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3 years agoon
For the first time since the early 1900s, more Americans are dying at home rather than in hospitals, a trend that reflects more hospice care and progress toward the kind of end that most people say they want.
Deaths in nursing homes also have declined, according to Wednesday’s report in the New England Journal of Medicine.
Deaths in homes rose, from 24% to 31%. Some assisted living centers may have been counted as homes; researchers had no way to tell.
People who were younger, female or a racial or ethnic minority were less likely to die at home than those who were older, male or white. Cancer patients were more likely to die at home; people with dementia, in a nursing home, and people with lung diseases, in a hospital.
The type of illness matters, McNair said. Besides her father, she helped care for a brother who died of Lou Gehrig’s disease in his 50s, and her mother, who died at age 92 in a nursing home after a long decline in health.
“They were all completely different experiences,” and sometimes it’s not possible to adequately care for a family member at home, McNair said.
Allison Beach and her husband struggled to figure out how to get help for her mother, Kathryne Beach, who lived with them for three years before dying at their home in Hinesburg, Vermont, in 2016. She had lost her vision, had suffered a fall and then succumbed to heart failure at age 91.
In this 2016 photo provided by Thomas Marrinson, Kathryne Beach lays shrouded inside her family’s home following her death in Hinesburg, Vt. Allison Beach and her husband struggled to figure out how to get help for her mother, who lived with them for three years before dying at their home Hinesburg, Vermont, in 2016. The experience led Beach, who was a nurse, to seek special training in end-of-life care and has become a doula, hoping to help others in such circumstances. (Thomas Marrinson via AP)
“We had to really reshuffle our lives. I was determined not to put her into a facility,” Beach said. “We were alone with her at the time of death and I wish we had had more support.”
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