Implications for practice and research

• Families providing end-of-life care in the home urgently require well-resourced community nursing services.

• Future research should explore the perspectives of people who choose, for whatever reason, not to take on formal and intimate caregiving roles for their dying family members.

Context

The idea of home as a preferred location to achieve a ‘good death’ has become popular within end-of-life care discourse. So popular that hospital death is a measure of failed palliative care.1 Less attention is paid—with notable exceptions2—to critically examining the challenges of home care at end of life.