Trends in Cancer Care at End of Life

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJ) has published A Dartmouth Atlas of Health Care Brief on Trends in Cancer Care at the End of Life. The brief notes that “[s]ince the last Dartmouth Atlas report,… the trends in end-of-life cancer care across the country have been mixed …  While
patients are spending fewer days hospitalized in the last month of life, the number of days in ICUs has increased. Hospice days have also increased, but a growing proportion of patients begin receiving hospice services in the last three days of life, a time period often too short to provide patients the full benefit of hospice care.”  The data that accompanies the report is available on the Dartmouth Atlas site.