NYers stay put in the ‘home’ stretch of life

More New Yorkers are choosing to spend the last moments of their life in the comfort of their own homes rather than in a hospital bed.

The percentage of terminally ill city residents who pass away at home has been on the increase for the past eight years.

“It’s become understood it’s more comfortable to die at home,” said Arthur Caplan, director of medical ethics at NYU Langone Medical Center. “It’s become acceptable to think and plan about dying at home.”

Just 18.9 percent of New Yorkers who died in 2007 did so in their own homes, according to figures compiled by the city’s Department of Health & Mental Hygiene.

That figure has been climbing every year — reaching 23.4 percent in 2015, according to the most recent data available.

“I do think it’s a trend,” said Dr. Susan Cohen, director of the Palliative Care Program at Bellevue Hospital. “If we’re having the conversations that will offer [home death] as an option, they will take it.”

City hospitals still remain the most common place to pass away. But hospital deaths have been declining for years — from 51.4 percent in 2011 to 46.4 percent in 2015.

While city data don’t specify which ailments most commonly lead to home death, palliativecare researchers and medical ethicists said that dying patients are choosing comfort over more medical treatment.

In addition, the proportion of deaths at licensed hospices in the city has risen from just 1.8 percent in 2011 to 5 percent.

It’s not clear to medical professionals what changed patients’ minds about where they choose to live out their last days.

Cohen cited the American Board of Medical Specialties’ move in 2006 to formally recognize palliative care as an official specialty.

That recognition could have eased the concerns of patients and their families about the process.

Arthur Caplan, from NYU, traced the roots of this die-athome trend back to the 1980s and early 1990s when AIDS ravaged America’s gay community.

“HIV led people to rethink how to care for the dying. For a gay man [in that era], being in hospital was not a comfortable place to be,” Caplan said. “There was a stigma [in a hospital], but [at home] you could be surrounded by your loved ones and friends.” dli@nypost.com