Medical Decisions in Question: Mental incapacity missed by docs

It’s bad enough to be a patient in a hospital. What’s worse, according to a team of British researchers, is that a substantial minority of medical patients is legally incompetent to make decisions about their treatment, yet their physicians often overlook this limitation.

Over an 18-month period, about one-third of a predominantly elderly group of people treated at a London hospital for at least 2 days exhibited an inability to understand the treatment decisions that they faced, say psychiatrist Matthew Hotopf of the Institute of Psychiatry in London and his colleagues.