A University of Toronto study of more than a million patients has shown that female surgeons in Canada, on average, do better work than their male colleagues. According to the researchers, patients operated on by a woman have a lower risk of death, an unplanned readmission or a serious complication than patients operated on by a man.
This research group already came to the same conclusion in 2017, but then only looked at the period up to thirty days after the operation.
The study examined 25 different types of surgery, including heart and vessel surgery and orthopedic, gynecological and urological interventions.
Numbers
“When we look at our primary results combined, patients who went under the knife of a male surgeon 90 days after surgery were 8 percent more likely to have a complication,” said study researcher Christopher JD Wallis in an interview with the popular science magazine. news site Scientias.nl. “After a year, this percentage is 6 percent.”
There’s even a bigger effect when it comes to deceased patients, Wallis says. After using the corrected models, it appears that after surgery by a male surgeon, patients run a 25 percent higher risk of dying than if a woman operated on them.
explanations
Wallis does not have a well-founded explanation for the differences. This may be revealed in further research. He does have possible explanations. “It has long been known that there are differences between male and female doctors in the performance of their work,” he told science site Scientias. “Including the amount of time they spend with patients, the way they communicate and the extent to which they comply with the guidelines. It could well be that these factors contribute to the firm conclusions of our study.”
Swedish researchers came to a similar conclusion in a study of complications during gallbladder surgery, but the differences were considerably smaller.
