Female Doctors Better for Your Health

Female Doctors Better for Your Health pixabay.com According to Dr. Ashish Jha, “there’s a lot of evidence out there that male and female physicians practice medicine a little bit differently … The data out there says that women physicians tend to be a little bit better at sticking to the evidence and doing the things that we know work better … We estimate that approximately 32,000 fewer patients would die if male physicians could achieve the same outcomes as female physicians every year.” The records for over 1.5 million elderly, Medicare patients that were admitted to hospitals for medical reasons (not surgery) between the years 2011 and 2015 were used in this research. The report was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association’s JAMA Internal Medicine. It states, “Patients cared for by female physicians had lower 30-day mortality than did patients treated by male physicians.” Again, the difference may appear small, and Jha understands this outlook on the research. However Jha’s team ensures their readers that this matters to patient mortality. Over this four year span, a little below 11 percent of patients that were treated by female doctors died within a month of being admitted to the hospital, while 11.5 percent of patients that were treated by male doctors died within a month. On this same note, 15 percent of patients that were treated by female doctors ended up returning to the hospital within the month while 15.5 percent of patients treated by male doctors ended up returning. According to the researchers, “We estimate that approximately 32,000 fewer patients would die if male physicians could achieve the same outcomes as female physicians every year.” This is, obviously, a bold statement to make based on gender, and one that we shouldn’t take lightly. Further research will certainly need to be conducted to ascertain how much of this depends on gender dynamics and how much depends on chance and other confounding factors. According to the researchers, “Previous work has shown that female physicians have a more patient-centered communication style, are more encouraging and reassuring, and have longer visits than male physicians.” And again, the issue here isn’t just concerning the patients, but also the wage gap that, according to this data, isn’t warranted. According to Dr. Anna Parks (University of California, San Francisco), “Despite evidence suggesting that female physicians may provide higher-quality care, some have argued that career interruptions for childrearing, higher rates of part-time employment, and greater tradeoffs between home and work responsibilities may compromise the quality of care provided by female physicians and justify higher salaried among male physicians.” So what exactly is this wage gap? According to one study, white, male doctors averaged an annual salary of $250K while white, female doctors averaged an annual salary of $163K. And, according to Parks, this isn’t justified as male doctors don’t focus as much on the patients as female doctors. So what are the potential solutions to this problem? Some researchers suggest that physicians be paid based on performance, as this would create pay by merit. That being said, this is difficult to implement as it’s almost impossible to define “good performance” in such a situational setting. For instance, would oncology doctors perform worse than pediatricians on average? Of course. That being said, these researchers from this study still believe that performance-based pay could be an answer to the wage gap. But a true correction to the problem would just be to pay men and women the same salaries for the same levels at the same jobs. In other words: equal pay for equal work. Jha also notes the importance of determining what the differences between male and female doctors’ patient results entail in order to teach doctors how best to perform their duties.