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There is a need to improve education and knowledge about specialist palliative care and hospice care amongst health and social care professionals, patients and carers. Standardized referral criteria need to be developed. Further work is also needed to assess the needs of those not currently accessing palliative care services.

Older people perceive factors they associate with 'home' as crucial to a good death, most notably presence of friends and family, but many anticipate that they would prefer to be cared for elsewhere when dying. These findings run counter to assumptions that the medicalised, institutional death cannot be a 'good death'. It is important that dying in hospital is not demonized, but rather efforts made to examine how institutional deaths can take on a more meaningful quality.

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