Download This Paper
Preprints with The Lancet is a collaboration between The Lancet Group of journals and SSRN to facilitate the open sharing of preprints for early engagement, community comment, and collaboration. Preprints available here are not Lancet publications or necessarily under review with a Lancet journal. These preprints are early-stage research papers that have not been peer-reviewed. The usual SSRN checks and a Lancet-specific check for appropriateness and transparency have been applied. The findings should not be used for clinical or public health decision-making or presented without highlighting these facts. For more information, please see the FAQs.
Murders Against Doctors During 2010-2019 in China Mainland: A Cross-Sectional Survey
15 Pages Posted: 11 Mar 2020
More...Abstract
Background: Violence against medical staff is rising and it deteriorates the patient-doctor relationship badly. We aimed to investigate the characteristics of the cases involving killed Chinese doctors that happened during 2010-2019 in China mainland.
Method: We investigated the cases involving killed Chinese doctors during 2010-2019 in China mainland. Firstly, we collected reports written by Chinese from Baidu News with a crawler software named “Octopus”, using the search terms “ 杀” and “医”. Secondly, we screened out and double-checked the cases involving killed Chinese doctors that happened during 2010-2019 in China mainland. Thirdly, we further collected the qualified cases discovered in the two earlier steps. And fourthly, we collected the relevant details of the identified cases with conventional web searching skills utilizing Baidu search engine and Biying search engine on the web and double-checked all the collected data.
Findings: 36 murder cases were collected, among whom 2 cases happened before 2010, 5 cases were irrelevant with medical activities, 2 cases were related with doctor victims survived, 2 cases were reported with too few interested details and 2 cases were not intentional murder, remaining 22 cases qualified for final analysis. There were doctors murdered every year during 2010-2019 in China mainland, with 1-3 cases each year. Every case was conducted by a single murderer. Most of the cases happened in provinces located in eastern China. Murder cases happened across different levels of medical facilities, there were 8 (34.4%) cases happened in tertiary hospitals, and 5 (22.7%) and 6 (27.3%) for secondary and primary medical institutions, respectively. Another 3 (13.6) cases happened in specialized hospitals. The departments that murders frequently occurred were andrology and general practice. Among the 22 involved patients, only 2(9.1%) were diagnosed with a life-threatening disease. According to the reports, 9 (40.9%) cases were caused by distrust, another 9 (40.9%) cases were caused by dissatisfied curative effect. Surgeries were done to 7 (31.8%) cases and there was no therapy involved in 4 (18.2%) cases. All the murderers were male, with median age of 34 (IQR: 31-45) years. Most of the murderers were from vulnerable groups like migrant workers, farmers, unemployed or divorced citizens and students dropped out from high school. As for the 22 killer doctors, 15 (68.2%) of them were male with median age of 49 (IQR: 41-56) years and 16(72%) of them had an advanced professional title or position, such as attending physician and above, dean.
Conclusion: We suggest doctors, especially those doctors with advanced professional title or position, attending patients from vulnerable group with more care, patience and communication skills, even when dealing with ordinary diseases. Mutual understanding and communication may help to stop the murder. However, the ultimate cure lies in the reform of the healthcare system in China.
Funding Statement: None.
Declaration of Interests: We declare no competing interests.
Keywords: Murder; Chinese doctor; Patient-doctor relationship; Cross-sectional survey
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation