So what are the worst medical specialties with highest malpractice rates? Are you interested in reading about medical issues? Insider Monkey recently published an article in which we can have some insight into which medical jos are probably the hardest to perform.
If a doctor is sued surely it isn’t a nice experience as the stats show when physicians reach the age of 65, 99% of them are projected to face a malpractice claim. Therefore most physicians feel that being sued is inevitable and resort to defensive medicine. This means when a doctor orders unnecessary tests, avoid those patients who can have complications, eliminate high risk procedures, and so on. Of course this can be understood if we imagine ourselves into their places, but there are problems with it: defensive medicine means too much task for laboratories, and experts who work there, and also it raises the cost of healthcare, but it can also pose health risks to the patient.
The stats that Insider Monkey found were extremely interesting but they didn’t explain one thing: why male doctors have nearly 2.5 times of chance to be sued than female doctors. Perhaps the reason is that the main cause of suing is physician – patient communication. And the fact is that women are better at communication.order to get the right answer, Insider Monkey has consulted sites like New England Journal of Medicine. Insider Monkey ranked specialties by the annual probability of facing a malpractice claim, they used percentages to show the possibilities of claims. We have picked three specialties from their list: oncology, pulmonary medicine, and urology. Some claims against oncologists are delay in diagnosis of cancer, incorrect chemotherapy dosage, suboptimal pain management for a dying patient, negligence for informed consent. Failure to diagnose pulmonary embolism or lung cancer, premature extubation of a ventilated patient, injury of a patient during bronchoscopy are just some examples of pulmonary medicine malpractice claims. When it comes to urology surgical procedures with postoperative complications are the most common reason for malpractice claims, prostatectomy usually resulting in the most expansive claims. Taking into account that average rate of malpractice claims for all physician specialties is 7.4%, and that urology’s got rate above 10%, it’s not surprising that it is on our list of 10 worst medical specialties with the highest malpractice rates.
For any further information we recommend reading Insider Monkey’s article about the worst medical specialties with highest malpractice rates.
