Article Text

Download PDFPDF
Who gets to die at home? Race and disease-related cause of death impacts young adults’ place of death
  1. Ursula M Sansom-Daly1,2,3,
  2. Jennifer W Mack4
  1. 1 Behavioural Sciences Unit, School of Clinical Medicine, University of New South Wales (UNSW) Medicine & Health, Randwick Clinical Campus, Discipline of Paediatrics and Child Health, UNSW, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
  2. 2 Kids Cancer Centre, Sydney Children's Hospital Randwick, Randwick, New South Wales, Australia
  3. 3 Sydney Youth Cancer Service, Prince of Wales Hospital, Nelune Comprehensive Cancer Centre, Randwick, New South Wales, Australia
  4. 4 Division of Population Sciences and Department of Pediatric Oncology, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Boston, Massachusetts, USA
  1. Correspondence to Dr Ursula M Sansom-Daly, Behavioural Sciences Unit, School of Clinical Medicine, University of New South Wales (UNSW) Medicine & Health, Randwick Clinical Campus, Discipline of Paediatrics, UNSW, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia; ursula{at}unsw.edu.au

Statistics from Altmetric.com

Request Permissions

If you wish to reuse any or all of this article please use the link below which will take you to the Copyright Clearance Center’s RightsLink service. You will be able to get a quick price and instant permission to reuse the content in many different ways.

Commentary on: Gustafson CM, Higgins M, Wood KA, Song MK. Place of death for young adults with chronic illness. Nurs Res. 2023 Jul 11. doi: 10.1097/NNR.0000000000000681. Epub ahead of print.

Implications for practice and research

  • Clinicians must communicate with young adults (YAs) throughout their disease course about end-of-life care preferences, including place-of-death.

  • Future research must explore YAs’ preferences for place-of-death.

Context

Young adults (YAs) with serious illnesses report wanting choices in their end-of-life care.1–3 Where YAs would prefer to die is highly personal, though some studies have reported that many YAs prefer home-based palliative care and death.2 3 Yet, many YAs experience high-intensity, inpatient care at the end of their lives,4 with approximately half of YAs with cancer dying in hospital.4 Factors influencing these patterns of care—and the extent to which care is congruent with YA patient/family preferences—remain understudied.

Methods

Gustafson and …

View Full Text

Footnotes

  • Funding US-D is supported by an Early Career Fellowship from the Cancer Institute of New South Wales (ID: 2020/ECF1163).

  • Competing interests None declared.

  • Provenance and peer review Commissioned; internally peer reviewed.