This study is aimed at looking into ways of improving policy support for those aged 80-plus in the final part of their lives. One’s end-of-life stage should be understood not as some segmented point in time that closely precedes one’s death, but as part of the continuum of one’s life that runs its course toward death. For that reason, policy support for oldest-older persons needs to be designed to help them not only to live well, but also to die well. Unlike oldest-older persons in some countries in the richer part of the world, where they are supported to spend the last days of their lives in the comfort of their own home, oldest-older Koreans, lacking policy support, mostly end up ending their lives in hospitals or long-term care establishments.

Welfare policy on the elderly needs reshaping so that it can cover the elderly population in general and at the same time put in place support specific for oldest-older persons in their last phase of life.