Quality of death of the elderly is an important indicator reflecting the level of public health. Focusing on the changes in the quality of death among the elderly in China, this paper uses the data of CLHLS from 2005 to 2018, and applies a stratified APC cross-classified random effect model. The trends of the Chinese elderly’s peacefulness degree at death and bedridden days before death were decomposed from the three dimensions of age, period and cohort, and were compared by gender, urban and rural areas, in order to analyze the differences in the quality of death among different groups of the elderly. The research findings are as follows. Firstly, there is a significant age effect between peacefulness degree at death and the number of bedridden days before death in the elderly. The higher age of the elderly, the higher degree of peacefulness and higher number of bedridden days at the end of life. Secondly, women had significantly longer bedridden days than men. In any age group, the urban elderly had a higher quality of death than the rural elderly; Meanwhile, the high-income elderly had a higher quality of death than the low-income elderly; Moreover, the gap between the two groups continued to widen with age. Thirdly, from the perspective of period effect, the number of bedridden days before death in all groups of the elderly in our country is on the rise in China since 2002. The peacefulness degree of the elderly at death as a whole has not changed significantly, but that of the urban elderly and high-income elderly at death has fluctuated. Fourthly, there was no significant difference in the quality of death of the elderly among each birth cohorts. Based on the above conclusions, the paper proposes to build a medical service system with the goal of health output, strengthen the construction of a palliative care system to improve the quality of death of the elderly, and increase support for the rural, female and low-income elderly to narrow the gap in the quality of death.
