رضا ضیغمی - Assistant Professor, Department of Psychiatric Nursing, Nursing College, Qazvin University of Medical Sciences, Qazvin, Iran.
الناز تک زارع - Master Student of Nursing, Nursing College, Qazvin University of Medical Sciences, Qazvin, Iran.

Introduction: Escape is an important health and safety concern that causes adverse medical consequences for patients and their families, health professionals and the community and increases responsibility and workload of hospital staff and executive director to return the patient to the hospital. Methods: To find documents related to the prevalence of escape in patients, the Persian/English articles were searched in databases such as SID, Science Direct, ISI Web of Science, Scopus, IranMedex, pubmed and Google scholar from ۲۰۰۸ to ۲۰۲۰. Results: Out of ۵۴ articles in the database, ۳۲ articles were eligible for inclusion and were selected for the study. Conclusions: The results of this review study showed that the highest number of hospital escapes were in Australia with ۲۰.۸۲, the United Kingdom with an average of ۱۶.۴۵, the United States with ۸.۶۲, India with ۵.۵۸ and Ireland with ۴.۲۸ and Iran with ۲.۴۰ per ۱۰۰ hospital admissions. More than ۲۵ percent of escapes were reported in forensic psychiatry in South Africa. Also, male patients, young people, single people, addicts, people diagnosed with bipolar disorder, depression and schizophrenia, and patients who were not admitted for a long time, showed a greater tendency to escape. There have been limited studies on the escape of patients from hospitals in Iran, and further studies are needed to comprehensively assess the prevalence of escape and the causes and factors affecting.

Escape, Abscond of mental patient, Escape from the hospital., فرار, فرار از بیمارستان, فرار بیمار روان