Social care and hospital use at the end of life

Care of the dying can be seen as an indicator of the quality of care provided for all sick and vulnerable people.  Though end of life care typically spans a range of different services there is a shortage of information on what people actually receive – especially in relation to social care.

The Nuffield Trust investigated the use of hospital and social care services for over 16,000 individuals at the end of their lives, in a study that used innovative data linkage techniques to show the combinations of services actually used during the last 12 months of life.  This was the first study in England to use these methods to look at the use of social care at the end of life for large populations.

This presentation is a collection of the key slides from our analysis.  A report of the findings of this study: Social care and hospital use at the end of life, was published in December 2010.