Failure-to-Hospitalize Claims in New York: Where the Mental Hygiene Law Standard Meets the Malpractice Standard

Stephan M. Carlson, MD, MBA, FAPA · Psychiatric Malpractice

A patient is evaluated, judged not to meet inpatient criteria, sent home, and harmed soon after. In hindsight the plaintiff's theory writes itself: he should have been admitted. The forensic task is to test whether the decision not to hospitalize was a defensible exercise of clinical judgment when it was made, or a departure that caused the harm—two different questions, and the second does not follow automatically from a tragic result. The two standards the case lives between A failure-to-hospitalize claim sits at the seam of two separate bodies of law, and an opinion that blurs them is easy to discredit. The first is the admission standard: emergency involuntary admission under New York Men

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