Views About Dying at Home: Survey of the UK General Public

The board of Marie Curie Cancer Care often refer to a finding in their 2004 survey which shows that around two thirds of people in Britain would prefer to spend their last days at home if they were suffering from a terminal condition.

They go on to suggest that this means they should concentrate all resources on doubling the number of people being cared for at home.

If you ask someone in the street (or sitting at their PC as in this survey) whether they would rather die at home or in a hospice or hospital of course most people will choose their own home.

But if you ask someone who is actually facing that situation you might get a different answer. For example, someone:

• who is living on their own, or
• who doesn’t have space at home for a hospital bed, or
• who needs specialist round the clock treatment, or
• with young children in the house, or
• whose family just can’t cope

And if you ask the person in the street whether they think hospices should be closed down to pay for their care at home, you might get a different answer to that as well.

But Marie Curie didn’t ask those questions. So here’s a question for them: why not?

Survey Results

These are the relevant results from the survey:

If you were terminally ill, in which of the following places would you rather die:
home-64%, hospice-23%, don’t know-6%, hospital-4%, other-0%
After being informed about Marie Curie and the free nursing support it offers for terminally ill cancer patients wishing to die at home, there was an 8% shift from 64% to 72% in the number of British respondents who say they would prefer to die at home. The biggest shift was amongst those who had originally opted for a hospice (581 respondents), where 28% now said they would prefer to die at home.

The full survey as published can be found on the Marie Curie website.