FACTS
- Home health workers face an array of safety risks — including overexertion, falls, car accidents and hostile pets — that make their jobs more treacherous than those of their hospital counterparts.
- The hazards of nursing work can impair health both acutely and in the long term. These health outcomes include musculoskeletal injuries/disorders, other injuries, infections, changes in mental health, and in the longer term, cardiovascular, metabolic, and neoplastic diseases.
- The number of Medicare beneficiaries receiving hospice care has steadily grown over the past decade.
- Hospice care ensures that caregivers don’t burn out. It also gives patients the tools they need to get through times of pain and discomfort, when they otherwise might feel compelled to call 911.
STATS
- The injury rate in home care settings is about 50 percent higher than that in hospitals, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics reports.
- Studies have shown that approximately 80% of Americans would prefer to die at home, if possible.
- A minority of dying patients use hospice care and even those patients are often referred to hospice only in the last 3-4 weeks of life.
- From 2003 to 2017, the percentage of people dying at home increased from 23.8 percent to 30.7 percent, researchers found. At the same time, deaths that occurred in hospitals fell from 39.7 percent in 2003, to 29.8 percent in 2017.