Female Doctors Are Better

Older patients who are treated by female doctors after being admitted to a hospital may be slightly
less likely to die within a month of their admission than those who are treated by male doctors,
according to a new study.
Researchers found that patients who were treated by female doctors had a 4 percent lower risk of
dying within a month of being admitted to a hospital than those who were treated by male doctors.
Moreover, these patients were 5 percent less likely to be readmitted to a hospital within a month,
the researchers found.
More research is needed to understand why exactly patients treated by female doctors have lower
mortality rate, study co-author Dr. Ashish Jha, a professor a health policy at Harvard said in a
statement.
But previous research has suggested that there are differences between how male and female
physicians practice medicine, Jha said. For example, studies have shown that female doctors may be
more likely to adhere to clinical guidelines, provide preventive care and communicate with their
patients more effectively than male ones.
The new findings add to that research because Jha and his colleagues looked at actual patient
outcomes. The results “suggest that those differences matter and are important to patient health,”
Jha said.
In the study the researchers examined data on 1.5 million hospitalizations of more than 620,000
men and 960,000 women who were on Medicare and were admitted to U.S. hospitals for various
conditions between 2011 and 2014. All of the patients were at least 65 years old, and their average
age was 80, according to the study. During these hospitalizations, the patients in the study were
treated by a total of about 60,000 doctors, including about 20,000 female doctors and about 40,000
male doctors.
The researchers looked at the relationship between the gender of the doctors who treated the
patients and these patients’ risk of death and needing to be hospitalized again within 30 days of
their original admission.
The findings that the patients treated by female doctors were less likely to die or be hospitalized
again are especially important in light of previous research that showed disparities between salary
and promotion prospects of female and male doctors in academic medicine, said Dr. Anna Parks, a
resident physician at the University of California, San Francisco.
For example, one study showed that female physicians at academic centers earn an average of 8
percent less than male physicians at those centers, according to the editorial.
Some people have speculated that female academic physicians may be burdened by additional home
responsibilities than their male colleagues, which supposedly may lead women to provide inferior
care, Parks said.
“I think that this study is one piece of the puzzle to combat that claim,” Parks told Live Science.

Key: 1) dying 2)/3) they stick to the guidelines / provide preventive care / communicate with
patients more effectively 4) 1.5 million 5) the United States 6) 65 7) 60,000 8) earn less 9)
don’t get promoted easily 10) their household duties