Surgeon sex and long-term postoperative outcomes among patients undergoing common surgeries (30 August 2023)

Summary

Patients have better outcomes with female surgeons, a study from Wallis et al. has found. In a cohort study of 1 million patients, those treated by a female surgeon were less likely to experience death, hospital readmission, or major medical complication at 90 days or 1 year after surgery. This association was seen across nearly all subgroups defined by patient, surgeon, hospital, and procedure characteristics.

Content

The analysis, reported in Jama Surgery, showed that 90 days after an operation, 13.9% of patients treated by a male surgeon had “adverse post-operative events”, a catch-all term that includes death and medical complications ranging from problems that require further surgery to major infections, heart attacks and strokes. The equivalent figure for patients seen by female surgeons was 12.5%.

Patients seen by female surgeons fared better one year after surgery too, with 20.7% having an adverse postoperative event, compared with 25% of those seen by male surgeons. When the doctors looked purely at deaths post-surgery, the difference was even starker: patients treated by male surgeons were 25% more likely to die one year after surgery than those treated by female surgeons.

A second study of 150,000 patients in Sweden, also published in Jama Surgery, paints a similar picture. Dr My Blohm and colleagues at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm reviewed patient outcomes after surgery to remove the gallbladder. They found that patients treated by female surgeons suffered fewer complications and had shorter hospital stays than those treated by men. The female surgeons operated more slowly than their male colleagues and were less likely to switch from keyhole to open surgery during an operation.