Skip Navigation

Occupational Medicine 2008 58(5):328-333; doi:10.1093/occmed/kqn080
This Article
Right arrow Full Text
Right arrow Full Text (PDF)
Right arrow Alert me when this article is cited
Right arrow Alert me if a correction is posted
Services
Right arrow Email this article to a friend
Right arrow Similar articles in this journal
Right arrow Similar articles in PubMed
Right arrow Alert me to new issues of the journal
Right arrow Add to My Personal Archive
Right arrow Download to citation manager
Right arrowRequest Permissions
Right arrow Disclaimer
Google Scholar
Right arrow Articles by Pitkanen, M.
Right arrow Articles by Kopelman, M. D.
PubMed
Right arrow PubMed Citation
Right arrow Articles by Pitkanen, M.
Right arrow Articles by Kopelman, M. D.
Social Bookmarking
Add to CiteULike   Add to Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us  
What's this?

© The Author 2008. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society of Occupational Medicine. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Doctors' health and fitness to practise: performance problems in doctors and cognitive impairments

Mervi Pitkanen, Juliet Hurn and Michael D. Kopelman

Neuropsychiatry and Memory Disorders Unit, Institute of Psychiatry, King's College London, Institute of Psychiatry, London, UK

Background As a response to concerns over the safety of patient care and quality of care provided by doctors, there has been an increasing interest in identifying the reasons for medical errors.

Methods This paper reviews briefly the common neurocognitive causes for performance problems in doctors and provides an updated account of the current literature. Search on Medline and PsychINFO for English language articles between 1956 and September 2006 was performed, as well as a manual search by the authors for other relevant articles.

Results Neuropsychiatric and neuropsychological assessment is increasingly accepted as an accurate evaluation tool to clarify the performance problems in doctors. Furthermore, it seems that neurocognitive difficulties are commonly found to be the cause for such problems.

Conclusions The performance problems in doctors need to be acknowledged ‘better too soon than too late’. Neuropsychiatric and neuropsychological assessment helps to create an accurate treatment and rehabilitation plan for the specific functional tasks of the particular doctor's duties.

Keywords      Cognitive functions; doctors; frontal-executive functions; impaired performance; memory; neurocognitive; neuropsychiatry; neuropsychology

Correspondence to: Mervi Pitkanen, Neuropsychiatry and Memory Disorders Unit, 3rd Floor, Adamson Centre, Block 8, South Wing, St Thomas's Hospital, London SE1 7EH, UK. Tel: +44 207 188 5396; fax: +44 207 633 0061; e-mail: m.pitkanen{at}iop.kcl.ac.uk


Add to CiteULike CiteULike   Add to Connotea Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us Del.icio.us    What's this?




Disclaimer:
Please note that abstracts for content published before 1996 were created through digital scanning and may therefore not exactly replicate the text of the original print issues. All efforts have been made to ensure accuracy, but the Publisher will not be held responsible for any remaining inaccuracies. If you require any further clarification, please contact our Customer Services Department.