Surgery is no safer when the patient and surgeon are of the same gender

Monday, November 27, 2023 (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 congruence” between patient and surgeon matters for outcomes.

“Because the difference in patient mortality between male and female surgeons was small, when choosing a surgeon, patients should consider factors beyond the gender of the surgeon,” advised the study’s lead author, Dr. Yusuke Tsugawa.

He is an associate professor of medicine in the Department 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 November 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, prostate removal, and thyroid removal.

Overall, about 1.2 million of these surgeries were performed when the patients and surgeons were men, while about 86,000 were performed when the patients and surgeons were women.

The remaining cases amounted to 1.5 million cases in which the patient was a woman and the surgeon was a man, and 52 thousand cases in which the patient was a man and the surgeon was a woman.

No significant differences were observed in terms of postoperative mortality that occurred 30 days after the procedure, and mortality remained at 2% or less regardless of how patients and surgeons were matched, the UCLA team said. This was true after adjusting for multiple patient and surgeon characteristics.

In addition to noting that any gender match between surgeon and patient is largely unrelated to outcomes, “It is important for patients to know that the quality of surgical care provided by female surgeons in the United States is equivalent to, or in some cases, slightly better than, that provided by female surgeons.” Males,” Tsugawa noted in a UCLA news release.

more information

Learn more about postoperative surgical risks at Johns Hopkins Medicine.

Source: University of California, Los Angeles, press release, November 23, 2023

What it means for you When it comes to post-surgery safety, it probably doesn’t matter if your gender matches your surgeon’s gender.