Next of kin perspectives on the experience of end-of-life care in a community setting.

Background: Previous studies of end-of-life experience have been conducted primarily in urban medical centers and mostly focused on preferences for rather than experience of care.

Objective: To describe family end-of-life experience and perceptions of care across clinical settings from a semirural community perspective, identifying experiences associated with patient quality of life as rated by next of kin.

Design: Retrospective study using structured interviews with decedents' next of kin and medical chart reviews.

A measure of the quality of dying and death. Initial validation using after-death interviews with family members.

A reliable and valid measure of the quality of the dying experience would help clinicians and researchers improve care for dying patients. To describe the validity of an instrument assessing the quality of dying and death using the perspective of family members after death and to identify clinical correlates of a high quality death, a retrospective cohort study evaluated the 31-item Quality of Dying and Death (QODD) questionnaire. The questionnaire was administered to family members of patients who died in Missoula county Montana in 1996 and 1997.