Prevalence and Causes of Escape in Mental Patient: A Review Study

Escape is an important health and safety concern that causes adverse medical consequences for patients and their families, health professionals and the community and increases responsibility and workload of hospital staff and executive director to return the patient to the hospital.

To find documents related to the prevalence of escape in patients, the Persian/English articles were searched in databases such as SID, Science Direct, ISI Web of Science, Scopus, IranMedex, pubmed and Google scholar from 2008 to 2020.

Out of 54 articles in the database, 32 articles were eligible for inclusion and were selected for the study.

The results of this review study showed that the highest number of hospital escapes were in Australia with 20.82, the United Kingdom with an average of 16.45, the United States with 8.62, India with 5.58 and Ireland with 4.28 and Iran with 2.40 per 100 hospital admissions. More than 25 percent of escapes were reported in forensic psychiatry in South Africa. Also, male patients, young people, single people, addicts, people diagnosed with bipolar disorder, depression and schizophrenia, and patients who were not admitted for a long time, showed a greater tendency to escape. There have been limited studies on the escape of patients from hospitals in Iran, and further studies are needed to comprehensively assess the prevalence of escape and the causes and factors affecting.