Facing death alone: An exploration of terminally ill individuals living alone in palliative care

Abstract

Home palliative care clinicians provide end-of-life care for patients from diverse social and economic backgrounds. They include patients who live alone—a single-person household.1 Auon et al. found that 7–12% of patients under palliative care lived alone for more than a year.3 Demographic trends increasingly highlight this group to be a growing population with pressing concerns (e.g. the number of single-person households in Singapore has almost doubled between 2012 and 2022).2 With the greying population, the trend of patients living alone is expected to grow.