Do gender differences affect the doctor-patient interaction during consultations in general practice? Results from the INTERMEDE study

Abstract

Patient-doctor gender concordance/discordance is associated with their agreement/disagreement on advice given during the consultation. Physicians need to be conscious that their own demographic characteristics and perceptions might influence the quality of prevention counseling delivered to their patients.

Primary prevention of cardiovascular disease: More patient gender-based differences in risk evaluation among male general practitioners

“…17,18,20 Diet and lifestyle advice is better understood by patients with hypertension who are the same gender as their GP. 21 Our objective in this study was to consider the gender of both the GP and the patient in analysing GPs' cardiovascular risk assessment of patients for primary prevention.…”

Patient-health care professional gender or race/ethnicity concordance and its association with weight-related advice in the United States

“…In addition, research indicates that female HCPs generally spend more time per visit [23]. Female HCPs also tended to have better communication skills with which to build health partnerships with their patients [7, 11, 24] and to facilitate agreement with their patients on nutrition and exercise [19]. Taken together, the longer visits and better communication skills may result in patients' having better recall of receiving weight-related advice from female providers.…”

“…Based on previous studies [7, 8, 19], we controlled for the following important demographic and socioeconomic factors, as well as health status, as covariates in our model: Patients' characteristics: Patients' age, language spoken/used at home (English, Spanish and other languages), educational status, residence region (Northeast, Midwest, South and West), whether the residence is in a metropolitan statistical area (MSA) and survey year.Patients' weight status: BMI was calculated from self-reported weight and height, e.g.,normal weight (18.5 ≤ BMI ≤ 24.9), overweight (25.0 ≤ BMI ≤ 29.9), and obesity (BMI ≥30.0).Count of the patient's chronic diseases based on respondents' reports of: diabetes mellitus, lipid metabolism disorder, essential hypertension, hypertension with complications and secondary hypertension, acute myocardial infarction, coronary atherosclerosis and other heart diseases, nonspecific chest pain, acute cerebrovascular disease, other cerebrovascular diseases, transient cerebral ischemia, cancers, coma, stupor and brain damage, paralysis, gout and other crystal arthropathies, and blindness. The number of chronic conditions ranged from 0 to 10.…”

Exploring community pharmacists’ experiences of surveying patients for drug utilization research purposes

“…The interaction between health care professionals and patients may be influenced by gender [30], with different consequences depending on topic [31]. Since the telephone interviews were conducted with female pharmacists only and the gender distribution of the survey participants is unknown, any gender based differences in experiences and behaviours remained undetected.…”