IJPDS International Journal of Population Data Science

A new study, published in the International Journal of Population Data Science (IJPDS), has investigated how the Covid-19 pandemic has affected who died at home in Scotland.

Previous work has found that the number of people who died at home increased by a third, prompting the question whether the characteristics of people who died at home also changed.

The latest study showed that, since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic in Scotland, the average person who died at home was older, more likely to be male, married, more sick or more likely to have long-term conditions, and was also dispensed a wider range of medications. This means that although there are still notable differences between people who die in a hospital, a care home, or at home, those differences have reduced.

For example, people who died in a care home before the pandemic consistently had a higher average burden of long-term conditions, but this changed with the pandemic with people dying at home now having the higher burden. The study concluded that more people with potentially complex care needs are dying at home, which has implication for their care, both formal care received in hospital or care homes, and unpaid care provided by relatives.

To produce these findings, the team linked death registrations in Scotland for approximately 350,000 people from 2015 to 2021 with data on hospitalisations and prescribing in the last year of life.

Lead author and Research Fellow Jan Savinc explained that “Understanding the characteristics of people who died at home is important to ensure services supporting them and their carers are properly resourced. The number of people who died at home increased drastically with the start of the Covid-19 pandemic and has remained at similar levels since, and people dying at home were as ill or more so than before.”

 

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Jan Savinc, Research Fellow, Health & Social Care, Napier University, UK

Savinc, J. and Atherton, I. (2025) “Deaths at home during COVID-19 in Scotland: Demographics, multimorbidity, and palliative care needs in population data”, International Journal of Population Data Science, 10(1). doi: 10.23889/ijpds.v10i1.2923.