The number is about the same as the death toll across the United States from auto accidents in a given year, the report said. These findings were published Monday in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
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There could be other reasons that female internists’ patients fared better, according to Jha. Furthermore, research has found that women doctors are generally more encouraging and reassuring, share the decision-making with their patients, and ask more psychosocial questions. At academic hospitals, male physicians receive more research funding and are more than twice as likely as female physicians to rise to the rank of full professor. Gender has also been shown to affect patient satisfaction.
So what is going on?
Although the study did not probe on why there might a difference, but researchers suggest that male doctors could a take a cue from women doctors.
To explain the discrepancy, the researchers point to past studies that have shown female physicians are more likely to provide preventive care and psychosocial counseling.
Dr. Anna Parks, a resident at the University of California, San Francisco, urged some caution in interpreting the results.
“The difference in mortality rates surprised us”.
The differences between male and female doctors may not hold under additional examination, suggested Mark Friedberg, a senior natural scientist at the RAND Corp., a non-profit think tank.
“Which doesn’t sound like big numbers”, said Calgary urgent care physician Dr. Raj Bhardwaj.
What the study drove home for Arora, who works as a hospitalist, is that women are certainly not worse doctors than men – and they should be compensated equitably.
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. However, for almost all of the conditions reviewed by Harvard, hospital readmissions decreased significantly for patients treated by females, as compared to their male counterparts.
The patient group was limited, too, he said – to older patients hospitalized for certain illnesses that internists often treat. Although the analysis can’t prove the gender of the physician was the determining factor, the researchers made multiple efforts to rule out other explanations. From that, they postulated that their findings had something to do with the quality of the doctors themselves.
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On average, female doctors make about 8% less money than men do. They specifically looked at patients who could not choose their doctors, or were admitted.
