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Why People Leave the Hospital Against Medical Advice

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I'd like to see a study that includes good reasons why a patient might leave against the medical advise of that particular hospital. For instance, when a patient has good reason to question the care that they are receiving. (You can't deny that it happens!) This article just further perpetuates the myth that doctors ALWAYS know what they're doing, and the patients have no idea!

Susie of CA 4:42PM February 01, 2013

I am wondering if there are situations in which the patient should leave the hospital AMA. I am aware of one case in which a patient died because the hospital staff was, quite frankly, incompetent. The patient's family and friends needed to be on constant watch to make sure that the patient wasn't killed by yet something else that the staff couldn't get right. In the end, even though she had been getting stronger before entering the hospital with a bad panic attack (that was momentarily confused for symptoms of the disease that she did have), she ended up dying in that hospital. I think that if you are very concerned about the quality of care that you are receiving at a hospital, you should consider leaving AMA before they make matters worse!

Susie of CA 6:07PM November 10, 2012

Another reason the check-out rate is high for substance abuse type programs is that they have a ridiculous amount of quackery ("12-step" anybody?) and not nearly as much actual medicine (psych care).

j.joelish of MD 10:49PM December 31, 2010

You should be able to choose to leave a hospital after your child has been ran around in circles for 3 months, and they keep changing her release date and running the same test that have came back negative time and time again. I'm done. My daughter is happy, smiling, healthy, eating and fixing to turn !year old. We are coming home today from Greenville Memorial childrens Hospital TODAY.

Ashley davis of SC 8:12AM November 17, 2010

people who are not comfortable with the hospital setup and wish to move

rachel rayavarapu of DE 8:37AM September 14, 2010

There are other obvious reasons -
1) it is not a pleasant place to be.
2) Additionally, it is full of sick people. Infections are rampant in the hospital, and one of the biggest motivators that I would leave early.
3) It is also difficult to truly rest with all the commotion, including staff checking in on you, traffic of your roommate, etc.

Leslie of WA 2:50PM August 31, 2009

I would not have imagined the number of these cases to be 368,000 in a year. But we're not exactly told here how many of those people had adequate insurance and how many did not.
OF COURSE, if one is poor enough to not have insurance and the meter is ticking at thousands of dollars per day (which is a LOT of money for anyone whose career is not lucrative enough to include insurance), perhaps this is not too surprising. Staying and worrying to death may not be too good for overall health either.
If we had had the national compassion and political sense we should have had decades ago to enact single payer insurance, this would be a much more rare problem.

Muser of NM 3:49PM August 27, 2009