If Male Doctors Acted Like Female Doctors '32,000 Fewer Patients Would Die'

Older patients treated by female doctors are less likely to die or need to be readmitted than if they are treated by male doctors, according to a new US study. Harvard University researchers estimated that women doctors have professional habits that their male colleagues should learn from to save more lives.

If you are sick, elderly and in need of going to hospital, it's understandable that you would want to get the care that gives you the best chance of survival and recovery.

Well, as well as eating well and exercising, you should perhaps consider being seen by a female doctor.

According to a provocative Harvard University study, elderly patients are less likely to die or need to go back to hospital when they're treated by a woman rather than a man.

If hospitalized, does it matter if your doctor is male or female? Perhaps, according to study by @ashishkjha https://t.co/oGJ1YoaZv2

— JAMAInternalMed (@JAMAInternalMed) December 19, 2016​

Public health researchers at Harvard University investigated three years of records for patients in the US aged 65 and over. Taking a random sample of 20 percent of people receiving Medicare, who had been hospitalized between January 2011 and December 2014, they found the gender imbalance persisted no matter what medical condition the patient had in hospital.

There was a 4 percent lower relative risk of dying prematurely, and a 5 percent lower risk of being readmitted to a hospital within 30 days, if the elderly patient was treated by a woman.

My quick take on our latest paper: do women make better doctors? Seems so. https://t.co/1skwE5PSGr

— Ashish K. Jha (@ashishkjha) December 19, 2016​

For some conditions like sepsis, pneumonia, acute kidney failure, and irregular heartbeats, there was a significant decrease in deaths after treatment by a female physician.

The study's senior author, Ashish Jha, a professor of health policy at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, said:

"We found a modest but, I think, clinically important difference in outcomes for patients cared for by female physicians as opposed to male physicians."

The author's claim that if their data is extrapolated to the 10 million Medicare hospitalizations a year there are on average in the US, there could be far fewer deaths.

"We estimate that approximately 32,000 fewer patients would die if male physicians could achieve the same outcomes as female physicians every year."

The study did not find that female doctors were better than men.

However, the researchers do suggest that perhaps women in the medical sector may have professional habits that their male colleagues are less likely to utilize.

My priors are confirmed.
Female internists better at evidence-based care & better mortality/readmission outcomes (Small diff but its there) https://t.co/joVkc113ls

— Farzad Mostashari (@Farzad_MD) December 19, 2016​

"We need to understand why these differences exist… and figure out how to translate it to the broader population of physicians," said Professor Ashish Jha.

Much of the response to the striking new study has focused on the persistent gender imbalance in pay that continues.

Another study, published in November 2016 in the same medical journal, JAMA Internal Medicine, found that US male doctors out-earn their female counterparts by an average of US$20,000 a year.

We have a lot of work to do! Can't accept this. Sex Differences in Physician Salary in US Public Medical Schools https://t.co/eI9tD5ulnY

— Nwando Olayiwola (@DrNwando) August 4, 2016​

Professor Jha said he hopes the study will spark a debate on how to better tackle such gender inequality.

The wage gap "is particularly unconscionable given the performance of women in terms of providing high quality care," he said.