Dying at home is on the rise

Although around two thirds of us would prefer to die at home, in the developed world the trend in recent years has been for the majority to spend their final days in an institutional setting, such as a hospital or hospice. But according to new research from researchers at the Cicely Saunders Institute at King's, the tide has now turned and an increasing number of people in the UK are dying at home. In England and Wales, the number of deaths at home nearly halved from 1974 to 2003. If this trend continued, researchers projected that fewer than one in ten would die at home by 2030. The King's team intended to find out if this trend had persisted, as part of a programme of research examining place of end-of-life care and death. In this study, the researchers analysed death registration data from the UK Office for National Statistics for all those who had died between 2004 and 2010 - over 3.5 million records. They found that, following trends in the USA and Canada, dying at home is now also becoming more prevalent in Britain.