People with opioid use disorder were less likely to receive palliative care during their last 90 days of life, a study published Monday in Canadian Medical Association Journal found.
A team led by Jenny Lau, MD, a researcher from the University Health Network in Toronto, examined data on people who died between July 1, 2015, and Dec. 31, 2021. The investigators compared who got palliative care during the last 90 days before death in people who had, and didn’t have, opioid use disorder. Of the 679,840 people studied, 1.6% of them had the disorder.
Individuals with opioid use disorders died younger and were more apt to be from highly marginalized areas compared with those who didn’t have the disorder.
Those who had opioid use disorder were 16% less likely to receive palliative care than those without it. The authors pointed out that the finding was most likely because people with the disorder tend to die suddenly from drug poisonings. The most common reasons why doctors ordered palliative care for people with opioid use disorder were cancer, liver cirrhosis and sepsis.
Regardless of cause of death, people with opioid use disorder were less likely to receive palliative care in clinics and their homes.
“People with OUD were less likely to receive palliative care despite accessing palliative care earlier, which may reflect their end-of-life illness trajectories and underlying structural vulnerability that may prompt them to receive palliative care primarily in acute care,” the authors wrote.
“Although most people in Canada want to die at home, people with opioid use disorder can have limited social supports, limited finances and unstable housing, which may lead to challenges accessing palliative care in the community and challenges for health care providers to deliver this care,” Sarina Isenberg, PhD, chair in mixed methods palliative care research at Bruyère Research Institute and adjunct scientist at ICES in Ottawa, Ontario, a co-author, added.
This article originally appeared on McKnight's Long-Term Care News
