New research has found that women, when operated on by a male health professional, are more likely to have issues post-operation than if a woman had performed the procedure.
Professors say death, complications and needing to be readmitted to hospital are the increased risks for women when men perform their surgeries.
The study on 1.3million patients involving nearly 3,000 surgeons concluded that women are 15% more likely to experience a bad outcome to surgery and are at a 32% higher risk of dying within 30 days of the operation.
‘This result has real-world medical consequences for female patients and manifests itself in more complications, readmissions to hospital and death for females compared with males,’ said Dr Angela Jerath, a clinical epidemiologist at the University of Toronto in Canada who co-authored the study, which was published in medical journal JAMA Surgery.
‘We have demonstrated in our paper that we are failing some female patients and that some are unnecessarily falling through the cracks with adverse, and sometimes fatal, consequences.
‘These results are concerning because there should be no sex difference in patient outcomes regardless of the surgeon’s sex,’ and that ‘when a female surgeon operates, patient outcomes are generally better’.
The study took place over 12 years in Ontario, Canada, on a range of surgical procedures, scaling all the way up to brain surgery.
Men on the operating table seemed to have same outcome of success regardless of whether their surgeon was male or female, while the results showed greater variation with female patients, highlighting a disparity.
No differences in the outcomes between male and female patients were found when women carried out procedures.
Jerath said: ‘There are some excellent male surgeons who consistently have good outcomes, [but] what is concerning is that this analysis does signal some real difference among male and female surgeons overall where practice can impact general patient outcomes.’
The study is said to be the first of its kind.
One specific kind of surgery looked into, a cardiothoracic operation, found 1.4% of women with a male surgeon died, when less than 1% did with a female surgeon.
Similar statistics were found across 21 other kinds of operations.
Overall figures show female patients operated on by men were 16% more likely to have complications and 20% more likely to need a longer hospital stay.
Training between the genders are the same, so this implies there are ‘differences between male and female physician work style, decision-making and judgment’ and that ‘subconscious, deeply ingrained biases, stereotypes and attitudes’ are affecting medical work, according to Jerath.
In the UK, surgery is still male-dominated when it comes to staffing – 86% of consultant senior surgeons – and these findings suggest that has come with ‘implicit sex biases’.
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source https://metro.co.uk/2022/01/05/women-more-likely-to-die-post-surgery-if-a-man-is-operating-15866248/
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