Why Patients Murder Doctors

To help healthcare executives fathom a particularly heinous form of workplace violence — intentional killing of providers — we focused on the murders of doctors by their patients, events sufficiently rare to preclude meaningful statistics in the available literature. To understand what motivates these terrible acts, we searched thousands of newspaper articles extending from 1860 to the present, using search terms to locate physician and surgeon killings. We found 123 cases where the newspaper article had enough information to populate our database. There have been only about five doctors murdered by patients per decade for the past eight decades. Dissatisfaction with medical care was the most common motive identified (42), with “unknown” and “alienation of affection” being next most common (21 and 20, respectively). Mental illness also was a common cause (20). Bad business deals and political issues also caused some of these murders. Strategies to prevent such events are described, including, most importantly, establishing a caring provider–patient relationship.