The study looked at two parameters – mortality at 30 days and readmission – in a total of 58108 female and 318819 male patients over a three year period
It is a battle of the sexes and men do not seem to be faring too well. A study that looked at relative treatment outcomes for male and female doctors suggests that patients tend to do better in the latter case.
Published in the journal Annals of Internal Medicine, the study looked at treatment outcomes for a 20% random sample of Medicare fee-for-service beneficiaries hospitalized with medical conditions during 2016 to 2019 and treated in the hospital. It looked at two outcomes primarily – mortality at a 30-day mark and whether or not the patients had to be readmitted. A total of 58108 female and 318819 male patients were examined.
It concluded: “The findings indicate that patients have lower mortality and readmission rates when treated by female physicians, and the benefit of receiving treatments from female physicians is larger for female patients than for male patients.” Of the patients, 31.1% had been treated by male doctors and 30.6% by female doctors.
An interesting observation was that female patients seemed to benefit more when treated by female doctors. “Both female and male patients had a lower patient mortality when treated by female physicians; however, the benefit of receiving care from female physicians was larger for female patients than for male patients,” the researchers from the University of Tokyo reported along with their co-authors. In fact for female patients the difference in outcomes when they were treated by doctors of the same sex were large and “clinically meaningful”, they reported.