Carers' health status: is it associated with their evaluation of the quality of palliative care?

The associations between measures assessing bereaved carers' health status and their perceptions of the quality of palliative care delivered by community nurses, general practitioners and hospital doctors to cancer patients in their last year of life are investigated in this paper. Analysis was conducted on a sub-sample from the Regional Study of Care for the Dying (RSCD), a survey in which relatives or friends of a random sample of deaths in 1990 in 20 health districts in England were interviewed some 10 months after the death. The sub-sample consisted of 1858 carers of people who died from cancer. The results showed statistically significant associations between bereaved carers' self-rating of health status, their psychological functioning, their experience of bereavement-related health problems, and their satisfaction with services delivered by the different providers. Further research is needed, however, to explore in-depth the nature of these associations.