A hospital has many responsibilities in caring for patients, including utilizing reasonable care to ensure for their safety. This duty includes attention for the patient’s safety as their mental and physical conditions, if known, may require. A hospital has to be prudent and careful in making sure patients in their facilities stay there and do not elope or escape. If they do escape, the hospital may be responsible for subsequent injuries that are reasonably foreseeable.There are specific and unique duties relating to psychiatric patients and those involuntarily committed to a facility. This brief overview does not address the variety of scenarios regarding care and protection of these patients. Of course, a competent person can refuse treatment or admission against medical advice. Hospitals and emergency departments must recognize a duty to protect a patient who is incompetent, unstable, violent or perhaps impaired by drugs or alcohol and, therefore, may escape from the hospital and cause harm to him or herself or others. The hospital staff must recognize these patients as possible elopers.
As a practical matter, this duty may require a hospital to have a person monitor the patient, or obtain a physician’s order to restrain a patient. A hospital cannot accept the implicit duty to provide care to a patient and not take appropriate steps to protect this patient from foreseeable harm. In short, a hospital should have and follow a policy to make sure patients do not escape.
This duty and the foreseeability of any harm or injury turns on the specific circumstances of individual cases. There can also be legal liability for failing to appropriately search for a patient following escape. While the patient may likely bear some responsibility for escape and the consequences, this is not always the case.
There are scenarios in which independent and superseding events break the legal causation requirements necessary for a patient to bring a negligence claim against a hospital after escape. For instance, there is a case in which a hospital was exonerated after a patient escaped and was later struck and killed by an automobile.
