Education: hospice research
Widows/widowers benefit if their spouse received hospice services
Research by Nicholas A. Christakis, Harvard Medical School, and Theodore J. Iwashyna, University of
Pennsylvania, published in Social Science and Medicine, indicates that hospice reduces the risk of
death in widows and widowers after the death of their spouse.
Quoting from the research paper:
Using a population-based sample of the elderly, we
assessed the potentially beneficial impact of hospice—a
supportive type of medical care that might be offered to
dying patients— on the spouses of patients who died. We
found that this type of care, even when used for a
median of 3-4 weeks, may be associated with the
subsequent health outcomes of bereaved spouses in that
it reduces their risk of death. This impact is present in
both men and women, but it is statistically significant,
and possibly larger, in bereaved wives.... Indeed, the end-of-life care a
woman's husband receives has an impact on the woman
similar in magnitude to that of various other modifiable
diet and exercise risk factors.
...
In short, mortality in a spouse is clearly a stressful
life event, one which itself also deprives the individual of
one of their principal sources of social support. As a
result of these two parallel effects, the individual should
be at increased risk for subsequent mortality himself. In
this light, our findings suggest that hospice care might
both decrease the stressfulness of the death of the
decedents and simultaneously provide some social
support that potentially partially replaces the support
lost due to the death of the spouse; these twin effects
might be the mechanism involved in the mitigation by
hospice of the short-term rise in mortality ordinarily
associated with bereavement.
...since the manner of caring for patients
might have effects beyond the individual patient, our
findings suggest an important clinical consideration for
doctors caring for terminally ill patients or their
partners. Physicians concerned about the impact of
impending bereavement have another tool at their
disposal beyond bereavement counseling or medication;
namely, they can attend to the specific manner of death
of the sick partner before it occurs. To do so may also
carry out the physician's primary duty to respect
patients' wishes because terminally ill patients consider
it very important that they not burden their family
members. Our results suggest
that hospice care may offer a tool to patients and
physicians that may soften the blow of the decedent's
death.
How we care for the terminally ill may have lasting health effects for their
loved ones.
Read the paper
