How and where patients spend their last days depend more on where they live than patient or family choice, according to a new report. The 1998 Dartmouth Atlas of Health Care shows significant disparity between Americans' experiences with death from community to community.
The report is published by American Hospital Publishing, the American Hospital Association's publishing arm, and is based on research by Dartmouth Medical School. The data are based on 1994-95 Medicare statistics and other healthcare databases, highlights include:
- The number of days Medicare patients spent in the hospital in the last six months of life ranged from 4.4 days in some regions to 22.9 days in others.
- On average, Medicare patients living in St. Petersburg, Fla., spent more days (4.9) in intensive care than their counterparts in Sun City, Ariz. (0.5) - both areas are popular retirement communities.
- The chance of being in a hospital intensive care unit at the time of death varied by a factor of more than five-from 5% to more than 28% in certain regions of the country. (To order the atlas, call the AHA at 800/AHA-2626)