Capturing the costs of end-of-life care: comparisons of multiple sclerosis, Parkinson's disease, and dementia.

The need for end-of-life care is going to increase substantially in many countries in the coming decades. In addition to considering the effectiveness of such care, it is also vital, given resource scarcity, to assess its costs and cost-effectiveness. Costs include the direct care inputs, other related services, and indirect costs, such as lost employment. These need to be measured in an appropriate way, and one relevant questionnaire is the Client Service Receipt Inventory. Studies of multiple sclerosis, Parkinson's disease, and dementia that have used this questionnaire are described in this article. What is clear is that the costs of providing end-of-life care can be high and that informal care from family members and friends accounts for a substantial amount of the overall costs.