End-of-life care

In Hungary, both the routinely collected data sets and the routines of data analysis of the health and social care system, the processes of surveillance, the materials and advocacy activities of professional organizations, and academic research provide little information on end-of-life care. Analytical work is also hampered by problems of quality, validity and access to data. All these factors combine to result in lack of knowledge on health system performance in meeting end-of-life needs. The lack of health and social care system performance assessment of our social care systems, including hospice care, means that the extent to which patients with hospice needs and their families can be informed members of society today remains unexplored. In the intersectoral and multidisciplinary field of hospice care, the past thirty years have not been providing valid and reliable information on inequalities in quality and access to care. Our research aims to fill this gap in the literature, and to exploit the analytical potential of administrative data on home hospice care at the district level. Our data will be drawn from both demographic data and administrative data from the public health system. Our results show that there are significant inequalities in access to care by place of residence, and even exploratory analysis reveals dysfunctionality, misuse in care.