Malpractice in Psychiatry

Medical malpractice is defined as medical practice errors caused by lack of standard treatment and care due to neglect, carelessness, lack of knowledge and skills. Despite psychiatry is seen as a low-risk area for medical malpractice, it constitutes 3% of all medical malpractice lawsuits. Also, there has been a 2% increase in malpractice lawsuits in the last 40 years. Despite the increasing number of malpractice lawsuits in the field of psychiatry, the current up to date researches conducted in Turkey as well as in the world is found to be quite limited. Therefore, the purpose of this review is to describe the content of malpractice lawsuits in psychiatry and to determine the measures to be taken for malpractice in psychiatry by reviewing the studies in the literature dealing with malpractice lawsuits in the field of psychiatry. For this purpose, databases were searched and as a result of this search, 29 studies which deal with malpractice in psychiatry in a conceptual framework were examined which are accessible online. As a result, the content of malpractice lawsuits in the field of psychiatry consist of suicide lawsuits, involuntary admission to psychiatric hospitals, failure to diagnose, psychopharmacologic agents prescribing errors, inadequate treatment, and boundary violation in professional practice. It was determined that suicide lawsuits took the first place in these legal cases. Most of the studies focused on the measures to be taken for malpractice in psychiatry. It has been seen that these measures are related to psychiatric professionals, patients, patient relatives and management in hospital settings and need to be handled in cooperation. As a result, in order to avoid malpractice in mental health settings, the rights of patients and psychiatric professionals must be protected, involuntary or compulsory treatments and hospitalizations should be clearly identified, easy access to advocates of patients and health workers and a supervisory board should be established. In this respect, it is thought that a establishment of national legislation about mental health will guide this issue