ABSTRACT
There are a number of gaps in this picture of the last year of people’s lives. The most important one is that we do not know what the people themselves thought about the care they received, about dying at home or in hospital, or about knowing or not knowing that they were dying. Another omission is that we were unable to include 18% of the people from our random sample. Some people who were isolated, with few relatives or friends to care for them or take an interest when they were admitted to a hospital or institution, have probably been omitted from the study, simply because there was no one who could tell us about their last year. A further drawback is that we probably attempted too much. In trying to describe people’s needs and the care they were given by relatives and friends, hospitals, general practitioners, district nurses, home helps and others we collected a mass of statistics as well as detailed descriptions of individual circumstances. The danger is that our more important findings have been buried in a welter of detail. In this final chapter we try to put our results into perspective and to highlight some of the ways in which services could be improved. The study has certainly revealed many inadequacies in present services.
