When you find yourself admitted to hospital, the skill of the doctors who treat you can often make the difference. And it seems that in this sense, the female gender has an advantage. A new study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine reveals that patients treated by female doctors are on average less likely to die during hospitalization, and also less likely to return to hospital after being discharged. A small but significant difference compared to the percentages of male doctors, the causes of which – at least for now – are not clearly known.
The study analyzed data on 458,000 female and 319,000 male patients admitted to American hospitals between 2016 and 2019. Of these, approximately 31% were treated by a female doctor during their treatment. hospitalization. By cross-referencing the trend of hospitalizations with the gender of the treating doctor, the researchers then calculated the mortality 30 days after hospitalization and the percentage of readmissions to hospital for each patient, depending on the gender of the doctor.
The results, as we said, brought to light a difference in health outcomes, small but statistically significant: the mortality of female patients was in fact equal to 8.15% in the hands of a female doctor, compared to 8. 38% when the attending doctor was a man. For male patients, mortality was 10.15% in the case of a female doctor, and 10.23% in the case of a same-sex doctor.
“What emerges from our findings is that female doctors practice medicine differently, and that these differences have an impact on patients' health outcomes,” explains Yusuke Tsugawa, of the University of California, Los Angeles. “Continuing research to understand the mechanisms underlying this link between doctor sex and patient health, and why the benefits are even greater for female patients, could help us improve patient health across the board. round”.
If it is true that female doctors do something different, and better, than their male colleagues, in short, understanding what it consists of would allow good practices to be spread throughout all hospitals, and among doctors of both sexes, in order to maximize the survival chances of all patients. In fact, even a simple mortality difference of 0.23% would translate into approximately 5,000 lives saved every year in a country like the United States.