Female doctors hurt productivity: report

My comments left on the National Post Site:

Mike Murphy, Thursday, May 21, 2009

This pattern is not new but may have just been discovered in medicine. Feminists like to promulgate the myth of women making 71 cents on the dollar as compared to men. The reasons why this is so are also evident in this study. Women have different work patterns, take more time from work for a variety of reasons including child birth, they work fewer hours on their jobs, they commute shorter distances.

The Victim Feminist spin will be the female Doctors earn less money than men. Now that we have that out of our system we learn to deal with it. We need more Doctors enrolled in med school whether they be men or women. Life goes on. If the victim feminists start to spin this as further victimization of women - mow them down with facts. This isn't about the patriarchy suppressing females it is about personal choices....and this on the MacLean's Magazine site.

When you give a monopoly to any group or organization they have not got the right stimulation (in the private sector competition) to redress what customers are telling them. If the RCOPS is behind the shortage and not government policy they need to be removed from any form of recruitment in med schools.

The study proves that females have different work habits, work fewer hours, take more time off for family reasons. There is nothing wrong with this and it is their choice. Those of us men who have been stay-at-homes for periods to raise children understand it completely. More men are doing the same thing and much more involved in the nurturing and rearing of children.

This pattern, as found in this study, is not new but may have just been discovered in medicine. Feminists like to promulgate the myth of women making 71 cents on the dollar as compared to men. The reasons why this is so are also evident in this study. They make less money because of the factors shown in this study and it is by choice not the patriarchy as victim feminists like Antonia Zerbisias, over at the Toronto Red Star, like to spin.

The Victim Feminist talking points will be the female Doctors earn less money than men and it will be true!. But it will be for reasons of choice as it is most every where else not because of that nebulous and evil patriarchy. Now that we have that out of our system we learn to deal with it. We need more Doctors enrolled in med school whether they be men or women. Life goes on. If the victim feminists start to spin this as further victimization of women – mow them down with facts.

If restricting entries into med school is artificial then it needs to be changed by the government regulators and the money found to support it. Tax and spend McQuinty can juggle his allotments and find it easily instead of buying our votes with our own tax dollars.MJM

Published: Tuesday, May 19, 2009

The growing ranks of female physicians in Canada will slash medical productivity by the equivalent of at least 1,600 doctors within a decade, concludes a provocative new analysis of data indicating that female MDs work fewer hours on average than their male colleagues.

The paper comes just a year after a blue-chip list of medical educators publicly condemned what they called the scapegoating of women for Canada's severe doctor shortage.

Dr. Mark Baerlocher, the study's lead author, acknowledged he is tackling a thorny issue, but stressed he does not favour curbing the number of female physicians. Instead, the study calls for greater increases in medical-school enrolment to offset the phenomenon.

"It's not meant to be a negative paper in any way," he said in an interview. "It's meant to take an objective, hard look at the work-hour differences that most people would agree are very real.... You can't simply ignore it because it's a sensitive issue."

The researchers led by Dr. Baerlocher analyzed results from the 2007 National Physician Survey, a canvass of doctors sponsored by major medical associations.

The survey found that women, on average, provided 30 hours a week of direct patient care, compared to 35 from men, a result of female doctors - still burdened disproportionately with child rearing and other domestic tasks - doing less on-call work and being more likely to take leaves.

Those figures were then factored in with population numbers to calculate doctor productivity per capita.

In 2007, women made up 32% of doctors. But with female students accounting for about 60% of medical school classes now, the numbers are expected to even up within a decade. When the male-female balance reaches 50-50, overall productivity will have decreased by the equivalent of 1,588 male doctors or 1,853 female doctors, all else being equal, the study concluded.

The decreased productivity would be felt sooner in specialties already becoming female-dominated, such as pediatrics and obstetrics and gynecology, the researchers say.

The long surgical wait times and lack of family physicians that plague the Canadian health care system are largely blamed on the paucity of doctors. Their ranks - now at 67,000 - would need to jump by another 20,000 to reach the average for Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries.

Much of the problem is blamed on a decision by provincial governments in the early 1990s to slash medical-school enrolment, just as the ageing Baby Boom generation was producing more illness. In recent years, enrolment has been increased somewhat again.

Dr. Robert Ouellette, president of the Canadian Medical Association, said medical schools need to train even more doctors than they do now, but he steered clear of suggesting the lifestyles of female doctors are making the shortage more acute. The new generation of physicians - both male and female - tends to work fewer hours generally than older colleagues, he said. And there is evidence that women spend more time with patients, are better communicators and offer more preventive medicine.

"It's not only the hours that count - it's the quality of care that's important also," Dr. Ouellette said.

After a spate of media coverage of male and female doctors' different work patterns, the deans of medicine and other senior administrators at the universities of Toronto and Western Ontario wrote an editorial in the Canadian Medical Association Journal last year that urged "ending the sexist blame game."

"To disparage in any way the intelligent, dedicated women ... who have chosen to devote their lives to medicine is shameful," they wrote.

Dr. Baerlocher, a radiology resident at the University of Toronto, said he agrees women should not be blamed, but lamented a general reluctance in the medical profession to examine controversial issues, such as gender differences and abortion.

"There are a lot of topics that aren't adequately studied, because it's deemed a socially sensitive topic."

National Post

tblackwell@nationalpost.com