Female physicians more likely to give flu shot
Click Here to Manage Email Alerts
Female doctors were more likely than their male counterparts in the same practice to administer influenza vaccines to their older patients, according to findings published in JAMA Internal Medicine.
Dan P. Ly, MD, PhD, MPP, a physician and assistant professor in the division of general internal medicine and health services research at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, analyzed Medicare claims data from 2006 through 2016 — representing a 20% sample of beneficiaries aged 65 years and older.
Ly wrote that after adjusting for patient characteristics, the data showed that Black patients were 13.5 percentage points (95% CI, –13.6 to –13.4) less likely and Hispanics 4.6 percentage points (95% CI, –4.8 to –4.5) less likely than whites to be vaccinated, whereas Asians were 2.3 percentage points (95% CI, 2-2.5) more likely to be vaccinated. After adjusting for physician characteristics, he found that patients of female doctors were more likely than patients of male doctors in the same outpatient practice to be vaccinated. For example, the difference by physician sex in vaccination rates was 1.7 percentage points (95% CI, 1.4-2.1) among Black men and 1.6 percentage points (95% CI, 1.1-2.1) among Hispanic men.
“This represents about 10% of the Black-white gap and about 30% of the Hispanic-white gap in influenza vaccination rates,” Ly wrote.
Ly’s analysis also showed that female doctors were more likely than their male counterparts in the same practice to vaccinate sicker patients and have fewer outpatient visits annually than male doctors.
“These differences may reflect known differences in time spent with patients,” he wrote. “They may also reflect known differences in communication style [and] do not exclude the possibility that patients who choose a female physician are different in other ways that make them more likely to be vaccinated.”
According to Ly, research that explains the differences in vaccination rates between female and male physicians may offer ways to improve vaccine uptake among underrepresented populations.