Patients Operated By Female Surgeons Have Lower Risk-Adjusted Adverse Postoperative Outcomes
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Abstract
Surgery is the modality of treatment whereby injury, deformity or disease is managed by removal, repair or readjustment of the tissue or organs. One may have to incise and cut open the body cavity to remove or repair the diseased organ. Surgical branches attract the doctors right from their student life. It requires deep knowledge, surgical skill, decision power, and determined mind to handle the complications. In modern era it has been observed that gender ratio in the medical college admissions is shifting more towards female candidates compared to male. Few decades back gynaecology was the preferred branch of medicine for female doctors to pursue their further post graduate studies. In modern times with changing social scenario, we see female doctors in other surgical branches like ENT, ophthalmology, general surgery and even orthopaedics! As our institute is a teaching hospital to affiliated a medical college in outskirt of Baroda city draining vast surrounding peripheral areas and serves to provide free of cost maternal and child health services under various govt maternal and child health schemes, labour rate in our hospital whorls around 300 per month on an average. Unregistered and complicated emergency patients referred from peripheral referral units constitute a sizeable bulk of patients . On average 8 to 10 major and 10 to 12 minor surgeries are performed in our hospital. Post graduate admissions fetch good number of female doctors to the hospital for training. In view of good no of operable patients and a decent ratio of male and female doctors we were inspired to carry out this study.
In view of the changing trends a study was carried out at Dhiraj hospital to determine the surgeon’s gender based post operative outcome of surgery in patients operated by male and female surgeons. It was observed that the patients operated by female surgeons had lower risk adjusted adverse post operative outcomes considering mortality, readmissions and complications.
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