"He said he could take his own advice": Stigmatizing language in notes documenting discharges against medical advice

Against medical advice (AMA) discharges are associated with adverse clinical outcomes and can be stigmatizing to patients. Most prior work has described patient characteristics associated with AMA discharges, with little attention to interpersonal clinician-patient dynamics that culminate in a discharge being designated AMA.

To describe clinical documentation about patients whose hospitalizations ended in an AMA discharge, attending to both what was written and how it was written.

We performed a qualitative description using inductive thematic analysis of 185 free-text notes from hospitalizations administratively identified as ending with an AMA discharge from Internal Medicine services at an urban academic medical center in the mid-Atlantic region in 2017.

Common features of notes regarding patients leaving AMA included documentation of: (1) the clinician becoming aware of the patient leaving before planned discharge, (2) the patient's reasons for leaving, (3) the clinical team's response to a patient's decision to leave, (4) the patient's capacity, and (5) insinuation of the patient's character flaws. While some note writers conveyed neutrality, we found extensive evidence of adversarial relationships with patients with unnecessary details and language that could stigmatize patients and bias future readers.

Many notes documenting AMA discharges contain stigmatizing language, with writers frequently taking a defensive or paternalistic stance toward their interactions with patients. Our findings reflect a lack of clarity about what should be documented in the medical record regarding the events surrounding this type of contentious discharge.