2023-11-28 01:35:00
UCLA study results suggest patients should consider factors beyond gender when choosing a surgeon
(HeathDay News) — More female surgeons are entering the field, raising a new question: Are your surgical outcomes likely to be better if your gender matches that of your surgeon?
The answer seems to be “probably not.” A study by researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles found little evidence that “gender concordance” between patient and surgeon matters for outcomes.
“Given that the difference in patient mortality between female and male surgeons was small, when choosing a surgeon, patients should consider factors beyond the sex of the surgeon,” advised the study’s lead author, Dr. Yusuke Tsugawa.
He is an associate professor of medicine in the division of general internal medicine and health services research at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA.
The new research was funded by the National Institutes of Health and appears in the Nov. 22 issue of the journal BMJ. In their study, Tsugawa’s group examined data from more than 2.9 million Medicare patients who underwent one of 14 surgeries between 2016 and 2019.
Among other procedures, these surgeries included abdominal aortic aneurysm repair, appendectomy, coronary artery bypass surgery, knee or hip replacement, hysterectomy, spinal fusion, removal of the prostate, and thyroid removal.
Overall, regarding 1.2 million of these surgeries occurred when the patients and surgeon were men, while regarding 86,000 occurred when both the patients and surgeon were women.
The remaining cases were 1.5 million cases in which the patient was a woman and the surgeon was a man, and 52,000 cases in which the patient was a man and the surgeon was a woman.
No major differences were seen in terms of postsurgical deaths that occurred 30 days following the procedure, the UCLA team said, and deaths remained at 2 percent or less regardless of how patients and surgeons were matched. This was true following adjusting for multiple patient and surgeon characteristics.
In addition to suggesting that any gender match between surgeon and patient is largely irrelevant to the results, “it is important for patients to know that the quality of surgical care offered by female surgeons in the United States is equivalent, or in some cases, slightly better than that offered by male surgeons,” Tsugawa noted in a UCLA news release.
More information
Learn more regarding postoperative surgical risks at Johns Hopkins Medicine.
SOURCE: University of California, Los Angeles, press release, November 23, 2023
What it means to you
When it comes to safety following surgery, it probably doesn’t matter if your gender matches that of your surgeon.
*Ernie Mundell HealthDay Reporters ©The New York Times 2023
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