As a mother, daughter, and friend, I have spent my fair share of time in emergency rooms. It can be grueling– even when the reason for the visit is fairly trivial. A broken collar bone, a hand-full of stitches, or a tummy ache from eating too many gummy bears.

But as a caregiver for someone with end-stage cancer, those minutes can feel like hours, and hours like millennia. I can’t begin to imagine how uncomfortable those same moments feel for the one who is actually struggling with the final stages of cancer.

Thinking those same thoughts – that ER visits can be “disruptive, distressing, and exhausting” – and understanding that roughly 40% of people visit the ER in the final 2 weeks of life, researchers in Canada decided to look at the reasons why those visits happen. Could some of these reasons be avoidable?