End-of-life care in Canada worse than in U.S., Europe: study

Canada has the highest proportion of people with cancer dying in hospital among seven developed countries, said a new study published in JAMA on Tuesday.

The study was conducted using administrative records for people over age 65 who died with cancer in Canada, Belgium, England, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway and the United States.

According to the study, Canada had proportionately the highest number of people dying in acute-care hospital settings, at 52.1 percent, while the U.S. was the lowest at 22.2 percent.

This suggests that on this particular metric, Canada is doing worse than other developed countries at helping patients die in the settings they prefer.

"Countries like the Netherlands and England tend to spend much less but generally have a much greater capacity to deliver palliative care and hospice care than countries like Canada and the United States that spend much more," said study author Dr. Robert Fowler, a scientist at the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences (ICES) in Toronto.

"A lot of that treatment in hospital is a very big part of what drives up costs, and ironically it's driving up costs for care that most people say it's not the kind of care that they want," he said.

The study was funded by the Commonwealth Fund, the U.S. National Institute on Aging and U.S. National Cancer Institute. Endit