Patients treated by female surgeons suffer fewer adverse postoperative events -including death- both 90 days and one year after the intervention than those who are operated on by men. This is clear from the study carried out by a team of doctors from the Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto (Canada) based on the medical reports of more than a million patients undergoing common surgeries, both elective and urgent, in the province of Ontario between 2007 and 2019 and that today has been published in Jama Surgery.
The researchers evaluated the cases of death, readmission or complications that the patients had had 90 days and one year after surgery. And after weighing the type of patient, the surgical procedure, the surgeon, the anesthesiologist, and the characteristics of the hospital where the intervention was performed, the results suggest that those treated by female surgeons have a lower rate of adverse postoperative events than those operated on by male surgeons. their male colleagues.
Specifically, 13.9% of the patients treated by surgeons had one or more postoperative adverse effects at 90 days, compared to 12.5% of those operated on by female surgeons. And if the analysis is carried out after a year, the percentages are 25% and 20.7%, respectively.
Regarding the mortality rate, it was 0.8% at three months and 2.4% at one year in the case of interventions performed by men, compared to 0.5% and 1.6% in those practiced by women.
This is the largest observational and multidisciplinary study that concludes that patients treated by female surgeons have fewer long-term complications than those treated by their male colleagues, but there are multiple previous studies that have already evaluated the association between the sex of the surgeon and the results of surgery. short-term intervention.
Jama Surgery itself today echoes another work by Swedish researchers and surgeons on the influence of the surgeon's gender on the results of the more than 150,000 cholecystectomies (intervention aimed at removing the gallbladder) performed in Sweden between 2006 and 2019.
After adjusting for factors such as the patient's age and sex, previous biliary colic, the anesthetist's score, or the surgeon's caseload, the authors associated interventions performed by women with a lower risk of serious complications, such as duct injury. biliary, and observed that patients operated on by female surgeons had a shorter hospital stay.
In addition, the operating time was longer for female surgeons, and male surgeons opted for open surgeries more often than their female colleagues for emergency surgeries.
Both the study on common surgeries carried out in Toronto and the one focused on Swedish cholecystectomies have found that the differences in results and postoperative complications depending on whether the surgeon is a man or a woman are more significant in elective surgeries, the planned ones, than in the performed urgently.
Doctors at Mount Sinai Hospital believe this may be related to patient selection and the preoperative care process and procedure selection in elective surgeries due to "differences in communication, practice style and patient relationship between male and female physicians" as confirmed by other previous studies on the subject.
Surgeon Martin Almquist, from Skane University Hospital in Lund (Sweden), says in an article entitled Are women better surgeons than men? published by the same journal, that evidence from previous studies indicates that "female surgeons are more likely to use patient-centered methods and show more willingness to collaborate and more care in selecting patients, and these differences could translate into different results for male and male surgeons".
In this sense, he stresses that performing a surgical intervention safely and efficiently requires that the surgeon have many qualities both from a technical and procedural point of view as well as character when making decisions, being prudent and careful, meticulous and attentive. retail. "Personal attitudes, such as attitudes toward risk-taking, collaboration, and decision-making, can influence surgical outcome," Almquist writes.
And he emphasizes that with the available information it is not possible to know if the differences observed in the Swedish study are due to differences in the personality of the male or female surgeons, but he points out that it would be interesting to study these differences to find out how to avoid adverse results in the interventions.
