--- title: Doctors Die At Home More Than Most People description: When it comes to deciding where to die, doctors are less likely than the rest of us to choose a medical facility, according to new research canonical: https://time.com/4185691/doctors-death-hospice/ author: Mandy Oaklander article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2016-01-19T22:13:00.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-02-22T14:15:29.219Z article:section: Health og:title: Doctors Die At Home—Not The Hospital—More Than Most People og:description: When it comes to deciding where to die, doctors are less likely than the rest of us to choose a medical facility, according to new research og:url: https://time.com/4185691/doctors-death-hospice/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt2a1c1501e2079655/698879ae524fc09f83df6589/stethoscope.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 5121 og:image:height: 2881 og:image:alt: 479631619 og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Doctors Die At Home—Not The Hospital—More Than Most People twitter:description: When it comes to deciding where to die, doctors are less likely than the rest of us to choose a medical facility, according to new research twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt2a1c1501e2079655/698879ae524fc09f83df6589/stethoscope.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # Doctors Die at Home, Not the Hospital, More than the Rest of Us: Study > Sponsored content. 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Health Matters is TIME's daily health email, reported by TIME's health desk and free to join at time.com/newsletters. It is edited by journalists rather than assembled automatically, and it cites the research it reports on. #### Is Health Matters free? Yes. Health Matters is a free daily newsletter from TIME, available at time.com/newsletters. #### Who reads TIME's Health Matters newsletter? Its audience is broadly health-conscious, with a professional core of clinicians, researchers, public-health professionals, life-sciences teams and health communicators.  by [Mandy Oaklander](https://time.com/author/mandy-oaklander/)  ## Mandy Oaklander Oaklander is a senior editor at TIME. Jan 19, 2016 10:13 PM UTC  Stethoscope Stethoscope Getty Images  by [Mandy Oaklander](https://time.com/author/mandy-oaklander/)  ## Mandy Oaklander Oaklander is a senior editor at TIME. Jan 19, 2016 10:13 PM UTC Doctors spend more of their lives in hospitals than anyone else. But when it comes to deciding where to die, they’re less likely than the rest of us to choose a medical facility, according to new [research](http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=2482317) published in the _Journal of the American Medical Association_. Dr. Saul Blecker, assistant professor of population health and medicine at NYU Langone Medical Center, and his colleagues used the National Longitudinal Mortality Study—which uses census and death certificate data—to find out _where_ 471,000 people died between 1979 and 2011\. They specifically looked at four groups: physicians; other health professionals, including dentists, veterinarians, nurses, pharmacists and dietitians; other highly educated people who weren’t in the healthcare field; and everyone else. About 63% of the physicians died in a medical facility, including a hospital, clinic or nursing home. That rate was similar to others in healthcare and people with higher education who weren’t in healthcare. But 72% of people in the general population group died inside a medical facility. **MORE**: [29% Of Young Doctors Are Depressed](http://time.com/4140497/medical-doctors-residents-depression-mental-health/) The study didn’t look at the reasons for the small-but-notable preference of physicians to die at home, but they may be symptomatic of the profession. “Doctors see a lot of patients who are treated aggressively at the end of life, and often in ways that seem maybe too intense,” Blecker says. Physicians may also be more familiar with the limitations of care and the quality of life that’s sacrificed with intensive care, he says. **MORE**: [Meet The Doctors Fighting To Give Patients The Right To Die](http://time.com/4038096/meet-the-doctors-fighting-to-grant-patients-the-right-to-die/) The numbers also reveal that people often end up going against their own wishes at the end. “Generally, there’s an incongruity between what people state as their preferences of how they want to experience end of life and what actually happens,” Blecker says. “Most people say they prefer to die at home, but as we show here, two thirds or three quarters die in some sort of medical facility.” [Palliative care in the U.S. isn’t adequately available yet](http://time.com/money/4064642/quality-of-death-index-united-kingdom/), and the fact that most Americans want to die at home suggests there’s more work to be done—even among physicians, who still die at medical facilities at high rates. “I think even if the people who should be the best at this are still not dying in the comfort of their home, that we still have a lot more communication and understanding of medical options to get more people to die a ‘good death,'” Blecker says. ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/4185691/doctors-death-hospice/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/4185691/doctors-death-hospice/"},"headline":"Doctors Die at Home, Not the Hospital, More than the Rest of Us: Study","datePublished":"2016-01-19T22:13:00.000Z","dateModified":"2026-02-22T14:15:29.219Z","description":"People say they prefer to die at home, but about three quarters die in a medical facility","url":"https://time.com/4185691/doctors-death-hospice/","keywords":["medicine","Death","Surgery","doctors"],"thumbnailUrl":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt2a1c1501e2079655/698879ae524fc09f83df6589/stethoscope.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"Mandy Oaklander","jobTitle":"Oaklander is a senior editor at TIME.","url":"https://time.com/author/mandy-oaklander/"}],"articleSection":"Health","image":[{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt2a1c1501e2079655/698879ae524fc09f83df6589/stethoscope.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","width":1200,"height":675,"headline":"479631619","caption":"479631619","creditText":"Getty Images","representativeOfPage":true}],"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Time","url":"https://time.com/","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://time.com/images/logo.png","width":528,"height":156},"foundingDate":"March 3, 1923","sameAs":["https://www.facebook.com/time","https://www.instagram.com/time/?hl=en","https://twitter.com/time","https://www.pinterest.com/timemagazine"]}},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"item":{"@id":"/section/health/","name":"Health"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"item":{"@id":"/tag/medicine/","name":"medicine"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":3,"item":{"@id":"https://time.com/4185691/doctors-death-hospice/","name":"Doctors Die at Home, Not the Hospital, More than the Rest of Us: Study"}}]}] ```