Suicide medical malpractice: an educational overview

Abstract

A malpractice lawsuit is in the legal category of an action in tort, which is a demand for compensation for the damages that have occurred. For a physician to be found liable to a patient for malpractice, four essential elements must be proved to sustain an assertion of malpractice: duty, negligence, harm, and causation. The incidence of malpractice litigation in the field of psychiatry is increasing. The most common malpractice claim related to psychiatric practice is the failure to provide reasonable protection to patients from killing themselves. A psychiatrist should be able to evaluate suicide risk on the basis of all available information, including patient responses to direct and indirect questions, known risk factors, information on how the patient behaved under similar circumstances in the past, and collateral information. Reasonable care necessitates that a patient who is either thought of being or established to be suicidal must be the subject of some precautions. A failure either to soundly assess a patient's suicide risk or to employ an appropriate safety plan after the suicide potential becomes foreseeable is likely to make a physician liable if the patient is harmed because of a suicide event. It is imperative for a psychiatric office or facility to have a good documentation. Careful documentation of evaluations and treatment interventions with a description of changes related to the patient's clinical condition indicates clinically and legally appropriate psychiatric care.

Understanding the Role of Psychiatric Principles in Patient Care: An Important Goal of the Medical Student Clerkship in Psychiatry

“…Many factors affect the quality of the psychiatry clerkship. Some recommendations are listed below ( 1 , 3 – 5 , 23 , 24 , 46 , 47 ): Supervision during the psychiatry clerkship is very important. Every student of medicine should be accompanied by a supervising physician.…”

The Impact of Safety Plans in an Outpatient Clinic

“…Subjects were not randomized because safety plan implementation for at-risk patients was already considered standard of care in the state (New York State Office of Mental Health, 2016). As safety plan documents are proposed to mitigate suicide risk in part by promoting patient outreach to mental health care, outcome measures were chosen to assess for change in patients' treatment engagement and utilization of a range of clinical resources (Sher, 2015). To avoid confounding effects of the start of treatment, we included charts for patients with safety plans developed at least 6 months after admission to the clinic.…”

Liability and Patient Suicide

“…Dereliction of that duty must directly lead to the damages (i.e., the death of the patient). Others have used words such as duty, negligence, causation, and harm (2), which essentially mean the same thing. Clinicians who are less familiar with the legal landscape of suicide malpractice might wonder how the physician is responsible for the actions of the patient who took his or her own life.…”