ReviewMayo Clinic proceedings2009
"I'm going home": discharges against medical advice.
Review in Mayo Clinic proceedings, 2009. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 125 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
125 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Leaving the Hospital Against Medical Advice Among People Who Use Illicit Drugs: A Systematic Review.American journal of public health · 2015Pooled it
- Association Between Hospital-Based Addiction Consult Service Implementation and Hospital Length-of-Stay and 30-Day Readmission Rates for Patients with Opioid Use Disorder.Journal of general internal medicine · 2026Article
- Association of unhealthy alcohol use reported in routine outpatient screening with 30-day hospital readmission risk.Journal of substance use and addiction treatment · 2026Article
- 'Doctor, I'm Leaving': A Practical Approach to Discharge Against Medical Advice.Journal of evaluation in clinical practice · 2026Article
- "He said he could take his own advice": Stigmatizing language in notes documenting discharges against medical advice.Journal of hospital medicine · 2026Article
- Article
- A comparative evaluation of time-series models for forecasting inpatient deaths and discharges against medical advice.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Association of Emergency Department and Medical-Surgical Nurse Staffing on Patient Departures Against Medical Advice.Journal of emergency nursing · 2026Article
- Discharge against medical advice among pediatric patients: A retrospective study from a Saudi tertiary emergency department.Saudi medical journal · 2025Article
- Magnitude and associated factors of discharge against medical advice among patients treated in the adult Emergency Department at an Ethiopian University Hospital.African journal of emergency medicine : Revue africaine de la medecine d'urgence · 2025Article
- Caregivers' reasons and health professionals' perceptions of pediatric discharge against medical advice in Eastern Ethiopia: a mixed-methods study.BMC pediatrics · 2025Article
- Article
- Article
- Improving Equity at Premature Discharge: Reframing Discharge Against Medical Advice Using the Structural Competency Framework.Journal of general internal medicine · 2025Article
- "It's like nursing a butterfly-so delicate, difficult, and unpredictable" - challenges of nurses in caring for patients with epidermolysis bullosa: a qualitative study.Orphanet journal of rare diseases · 2025Article
- Discharge Against Medical Advice From the Emergency Department: Results From a Private Hospital in Beirut.Cureus · 2025Article
- The experiences of patients who leave hospital against medical advice: analysis of survey data.Frontiers in health services · 2025Article
- Factors Influencing Patient Decisions to Discharge Against Medical Advice from Hospital Emergency: Insights From a Saudi Tertiary Hospital.Journal of patient experience · 2025Article
- Discharge Against Medical Advice in Cancer Patients: Insights from a Multicenter Study in Germany.Cancers · 2024Article
- Patient-Physician Sex Discordance and "Before Medically Advised" Discharge from Hospital: A Population-Based Retrospective Cohort Study.Journal of general internal medicine · 2024Article
65 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
1 author.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Discharge against medical advice (AMA), in which a patient chooses to leave the hospital before the treating physician recommends discharge, continues to be a common and vexing problem. This article reviews the prevalence, costs, predictors, and potential interventions for this clinical problem. Between 1% and 2% of all medical admissions result in an AMA discharge. Predictors of AMA discharge, based primarily on retrospective cohort studies, tended to be younger age, Medicaid or no insurance, male sex, and current or a history of substance or alcohol abuse. Interventions to reduce the rate of AMA discharges have not been systematically studied. This article offers suggestions for interventions based on studies in other areas of clinical care as well as the psychiatric AMA discharge literature. Studies for this review were identified by searching the relevant MeSH heading (discharge) and key words (against medical advice, leave, elope, hospital, and self-discharge) in PubMed databases and selecting all English-language articles from 1970 through 2008 that included data on adult medical inpatients.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.