Doctors who have had multiple negligent practice claims against them tend to go solo, or downsize to a smaller practice, but most don’t move away or leave the profession, a US study shows. 

More than half of the claims were among five specialties, with internal physicians accounting for 17% of claims, followed by GPs who made up 15% of the malpractice cases studied. 

The researchers looked at changes in practice size and exits from the profession among more than 480,000 doctors — who had almost 69,000 paid claims between 2003 and 2015 — by linking data from Medicare and the National Practitioner Data Bank, a database of paid malpractice claims.

They found 89% of doctors had no malpractice claim against them, 9% had one claim and the remaining 2.3% had two or more claims and accounted for almost 40% of all claims.