Including more women on hospital teams leads to better surgical outcomes

A new study published in the British Journal of Surgery finds that treatment in hospitals with higher gender diversity of surgical teams is associated with better post-operative outcomes for patients.

Across industries, including business, finance, technology, education and law, many believe that gender diversity is important not only for equality, but also because it enriches teams through the diversity of backgrounds and perspectives of their members. However, there is limited evidence of the value of gender diversification of healthcare teams. Most published reports have focused on individual physician characteristics and their association with outcomes (eg, how patients respond to female physicians). There is limited data on the role of sexual diversification in health care teams and their outcomes.

Team gender diversity likely influences patient outcomes through the differences that male and female physicians bring to the workplace. Both groups have different skills, knowledge, experiences, beliefs, values and leadership styles. Despite the benefits of sex and gender diversification for teams, female doctors in operating rooms remain rare. The number of female anesthesiologists and surgeons has increased by only 5% over the past 10 years.

Researchers conducted a population-based retrospective cohort study using administrative health care data in Ontario, Canada, where 14 million residents receive health care through a public, single-payer system. They studied adult patients who underwent major elective surgery with hospitalization between 2009 and 2019 to assess major postoperative complications.

The study covered 709,899 surgeries performed at 88 hospitals over the period, of which 14.4% had serious complications within 90 days of surgery. The median proportion of female anesthesiologists and surgeons in hospitals per year was 28%. Overall, female surgeons performed 47,874 (6.7%) procedures, and female anesthesiologists participated in 192,144 (27.0%) procedures.

The study found that hospitals with more than 35% female surgeons and anesthesiologists had better postoperative outcomes. At these hospitals, the surgeries were associated with a 3% reduction in patients' odds of serious complications within 90 days of surgery. The researchers noted that the 35% threshold observed in their study echoed findings in other industries in various countries, including the US, Italy, Australia and Japan, which also saw better results when women made up approximately 35% of the total membership. Commands.

“These results represent an important step in understanding how diversification affects the quality of perioperative care,” said the study's lead author, Julie Hallett. "Ensuring a critical mass of female anesthesiologists and surgeons on OR teams is not only important for equality; it seems essential for optimizing outcomes. We wanted to challenge the binary debate about comparing female versus male physicians and highlight the importance of diversification as a team resource for quality improvement care."

"Ensuring gender diversity in operating teams will require focused efforts to develop systematic strategies for recruiting and retaining female physicians, structural interventions such as minimal representation on teams, and monitoring and reporting on team composition to increase accountability in existing systems."