End Of Life Care Essay

This article is about two different studies that focus on the international challenges when it comes to end-of-life care for older adults. In the first study, Menec and colleagues separate older Manitobans into three different age groups, younger-old, old and older-older. I learned that half of older adults 85+ year olds pass away in a long term care facilities. This means that palliative care in facilities should be improving with time but that doesn’t seem to be the case. Although most patients prefer to die in the comfort of their home, only 30% of those people actually get their wish. According to Teno and others, nursing homes are the last to adopt palliative care for assisting dying patients. To improve this study, the author could’ve used a comparison group to show how far behind nursing homes are with palliative care. …show more content…
Instead of palliative care, these facilities are focusing more on rehabilitative orientation due to the lack of knowledge about end-of-life health care. Why is there such a lack of knowledge on such an important aspect? This study provides data that rehabilitative orientation is no longer appropriate for some patients and a large number of old adults would benefit from suitable end-of-life and palliative care. I was surprised to learn that with such a large number of older adults in our population, palliative care is still improving. I want to know why current doctors and nurses aren’t being trained properly when it comes to end-of-life care. If the 85+ year-old population is so large, why aren’t we more focused on palliative