You can’t always choose who operates on you, especially in an emergency, but the sex of your surgeon shouldn’t matter, should it? It just may, according to a Canadian study of 1.3 million people. It also may matter to Black women, who tend to have worse outcomes for many health-related surgeries.
The study reports that women who underwent common elective or emergency surgeries with male surgeons had a 15% higher chance of dying, experiencing a major complication, and/or being readmitted to the hospital within 30 days than they did if a woman performed their surgery.
In contrast, men experience similarly good outcomes regardless of their surgeon’s sex, the study shows.
Exactly why such “sex discordance” exists is not fully understood yet, and the study wasn’t designed to answer this question.
“We hypothesize, based on prior work regarding communication between patients and physicians, that this may underpin the observation,” study author Dr. Christopher Wallis, an assistant professor of urology at the Mount Sinai Hospital and University Health Network in Toronto says.
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Previous studies have shown that female doctors tend to listen more, and their patients may fare better as a result.
“Patients should seek to find surgeons that they trust and communicate well with,” Wallis shares. “As a surgical community, we should seek to better understand the factors underpinning these observations such that we can understand the processes of care that lead to optimal outcomes so all surgeons can use these and all patients can benefit.”
The study included more than 1.3 million patients who had 21 common elective and emergency surgeries between 2007 and 2019. Of these, close to 15% experienced one or more bad outcomes in the month after surgery including death, readmission, and/or a complication. Nearly 46% of patients were of the same sex as their surgeon.
Female patients treated by male surgeons fared worse after surgery, but female surgeons experienced similarly good outcomes whether they operated on men or women, the study shows.
The research took place in Canada, but the findings are likely generalizable to the United States, according to Wallis.
“This study provides new information about the role of sex differences between surgeons and patients and the potential relationship with outcomes by showing that sex discordance does affect outcomes,” Dr. Amalia Cochran, who co-wrote a commentary that accompanied the findings shares.