Terminal illness: views of patients and their lay carers.

This paper examines the responses of 28 terminally ill patients and their lay carers to identical questions about the patients' experiences in the month prior to their admission to an inpatient hospice. No statistically significant differences were found between the reports of patients or carers regarding the patients' activities of daily living, their physical symptoms, or the evaluations of the care they received. Discrepancies between accounts were most likely to concern the presence or absence of psychological symptoms, the degree of distress caused to patients by their symptoms, and the main symptoms experienced by the patient on their admission to the hospice. It is suggested that the accounts of patients' experiences given by their carers can be used as a valid source of information.