Patients Cared for by Female Doctors Live Longer

People cared for by female doctors are less likely to die or come back to the hospital after being discharged.

The study from Harvard found that elderly people in the US who were hospitalized got better results when cared for by female doctors. The first study to look at the difference in survivability when cared for by a male or female doctor.

The authors estimate “that approximately 32,000 fewer patients would die if male physicians could achieve the same outcomes as female physicians every year.”

The study used more than 1.5 million hospital records of Medicare patients over a four year period with more than 58,000 doctors, a third of the doctors were women. It found that elderly people on Medicare in hospitals, tended to get better results with female doctors. The people cared for by female doctors lived longer and were less likely to quickly come back to the hospital.

 

 

Photo: “bodycare, clinic, clipboard, doc, doctor, female,” by Ilmicrofono Oggiono is licensed under CC BY 2.0