Medicine and Health Sciences Commons^™

Transforming The American Experience Of Death: What Dreams May Come?, Melinda Xu, Geoffrey A. Silvera Phd, Mha, Lyle Walton, Jane Banaszak-Holl

Patient Experience Journal

There is no means to evaluate the death experience in the US healthcare system. Other countries have established population-wide measures to evaluate and improve the dying experience for patients and their families. With an increasing population of advanced-age persons, changes in sites of death, and a continually fractured healthcare delivery system, there is a need to establish a universal assessment of the quality of death in the US. In this commentary, we outline the need for such an assessment and build off of previous literature on the various existing assessments of the quality of death that have typically been reserved …