We never really worried about the sex of our attending physician. Man, woman, what can it change? Well everything, according to an American study published in the JAMA Internal Medicine and which has shown that female doctors do their job better than men. The research, which focused on four years of information collected by Medicare (health insurance system in the United States) and on 1.5 million visits to the same hospital, led to astonishing findings. Among patients treated by women, the mortality and readmission rates (which require one or more other visits) are lower than those of patients treated by men:11.07% against 11.49% in the first case , and 15.02% against 15.57% in the second case. And these statistics lead to the conclusion that, if men were as effective as women, some 32,000 lives could be saved every year!
How to explain such a phenomenon ? Several previous studies have noted that women working in the medical field are more faithful to the principles of medicine and tend to rely on proven methods. However, there is one major criterion to consider, as the JAMA study mentions:"Despite evidence showing that women provide better quality care, some argue that career interruptions related to pregnancy, the higher rate of part-time work, and other trade-offs made for the balance between family life and professional life, may explain the better quality of treatment for female doctors ". In other words, they do better because they aren't as present at work as men (and aren't likely to have the same number of failures).
The professor of medicine at the University of Chicago, Vineet Arora, meanwhile spoke of a “multiple factor” explanation. “It may be a little more specific to the doctor, or the way the patient feels about this doctor .
Be that as it may, these new data may be of benefit to female specialists who earn an average of $20,000 less than their colleagues in the United States...
