The future of medicine looks female. The culture needs to catch up, by KatharineSmart
Dr. Katharine Smart is a pediatrician in Whitehorse, Yukon, and president of the Canadian Medical Association.It was an innocent question from a young patient, as I and a team of other women worked to fix his broken leg in the emergency department. Too young still to have been affected much by bias or assumptions, he knew only a world of medicine led exclusively by women.
A study by researchers in the University of Toronto’s Temerty Faculty of Medicine, recently published in JAMA Surgery, reviewed outcomes for more than 1.3 million patients. It found that women patients were 32 per cent less likely to die and 16 per cent less likely to experience complications if treated by a female surgeon rather than a male one.
Women are also disproportionately affected by the increasing administrative burden in medicine, which is known to be a leading driver of burnout. A recent study examining gender differences in electronic health record usage showed that female primary care physicians spend more time working in their EHR inboxes their male counterparts because staff and patients make about 25 per cent more requests of female physicians than they do of men.
These women must answer to their respective medical college if they can’t provide coverage to their patients, yet finding temporary practitioners, or locum doctors, remains hugely difficult. When these physicians can’t find a short-term replacement, they must carry the continuing overhead costs of a practice or close it altogether.