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

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.