Defensive medicine practices among gastroenterologists in Lombardy: Between lawsuits and the economic crisis

Defensive medicine in Italy a nationwide survey

“…In our study, we observed a 58.78% prevalence of practising DM, which is lower than reported in other studies [2,4,8,9,10,13]. This was probably due to our sample composition, which included a significant portion of physicians working in less risky specialities [7].…”

“…However, we believe that our results show low use of negative DM practices, because of our mixed sample composition [4]. In fact, in studies focussing on high-risk specialties, negative DM was significantly higher [2,9,10,11,12].…”

“…Italy is a nation that has been significantly affected by the escalation of liability and insurance costs [10,26,27].…”

“…In the United States, 93% of physicians reported practising DM in a hospital, and 78% of hospital doctors in the United Kingdom and 60% in Israel practised DM in a hospital [2,4,7]. The percentage of doctors practising DM is higher for some specialties, including, obstetrics and gynaecology (97%), gastroenterology (94-98%), neurosurgery (75-83%), and orthopaedics and traumatology (96%) [5,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17].…”

“…In Italy, national data about the practice of DM is lacking [10,21,22]. The objectives of this study were to assess the prevalence of the practice of DM among Italian hospital doctors and its costs.…”