No, I'm not trying to avoid work but an interesting study just reported in the Journal, JAMA Internal Medicine, came to that conclusion. What does it mean?
First some background. This study looked at more than 1.5 million admissions to the hospital. All the patients were over 65 (and under Medicare in the US). They were taken care of by whichever doctor was on the unit. The researchers found that no matter what the diagnosis, if the patient had been taken care of by a female physician they were less likely to die or to be readmitted to the hospital within the next 30 days.
This study is important for a number of reasons.
Previous work has demonstrated that female physicians are paid less than their male counterparts and are also less likely to achieve full professorship status in academic hospitals. They get less funding to start their research. One argument to justify this was that because they took time off to have children and split their medical responsibilities with their home responsibilities they were less effective as physicians. Well obviously that isn't supported by this study. In fact, if we paid our physicians based on patient outcomes, they should be paid more, shouldn't they!
The other important message from this study isn't to drop your doc if he's a he but rather for us to try to figure out what the female doctors were doing that improved patient care so that we can all emulate them. There are a number of thoughts as to what these factors might be but no definite proof yet and so more work will need to be done.
The good news for those of us who are patients in Quebec is that we have more and more women entering medical school; medical specialty residencies; and, starting to practice. So while we're waiting to figure out what they're doing better, we can still benefit from their increased presence within our health care system!