Gender has little impact on the quality of patient care.

The report The Importance of Gender for Treatment Quality in Norwegian Hospitals investigates whether the quality of treatment in Norwegian hospitals is the same for women and men. The report is a collaboration between The Centre for Clinical Documentation and Evaluation (SKDE) and The National Centre for Women's Health Research.

Fourteen national medical quality registers have contributed analyses to the report. A wide range of health conditions are covered, including cardiac arrest, pain management, orthopaedics, and various types of cancer.

Generally receives equitable treatment

It is already known that gender can influence the entire disease trajectory – risk, symptoms, and survival.

This report shows that when patients receive treatment in Norwegian hospitals, there are generally small differences between women and men regarding treatment quality (investigation, treatment, and survival).

— The results from the analyses are good news. None of the medical quality registers find indications in their data that there is significant unwanted variation in treatment quality between the genders. Some significant differences are pointed out that need to be followed up, but the main message from almost all the registers is that women and men receive equitable treatment in Norwegian hospitals, says Philip Skau, head of the National Service Environment for Medical Quality Registers and section leader at SKDE.

Gender differences go both ways

Although the report generally uncovers small gender differences, there are still some findings that show disparities and should be followed up in the healthcare service.

For example, in cases of cardiac arrest in hospitals, more men receive treatment, and they also have higher survival rates after 30 days. More women than men report severe pain during colonoscopy, and even with pain relief, a higher proportion of women than men experience severe pain during the procedure. Women have sought disability benefits to a greater extent before spinal surgery, which results in lower workforce participation after the procedure – even though the outcomes of the surgery are equally good for both genders.

Another important finding is that gender differences go both ways. The fact that the differences between the genders are not one-sided is a sign that women receive better treatment quality than men for certain conditions, and vice versa. Data from the National Quality Register for Lung Cancer shows, for example, that women with lung cancer more often receive curative treatment and have higher survival rates than men.

— These findings are an important argument for why we need gender-disaggregated analyses of health data, says senior researcher Katrine Mari Owe at the National Centre for Women's Health Research.

Important follow-up of the Women's Health Committee

The report is a follow-up to the Women's Health Committee's NOU “The Great Difference – on Women's Health and the Importance of Gender for Health” (2023), and the government's women's health strategy (2024). It was pointed out here that health data has great potential to provide more knowledge about the significance of gender for health. The report from SKDE and the National Centre for Women's Health Research is therefore a follow-up to the NOU and the women's health strategy.

This is the first time register data is examined from a gender perspective. The work is in an initial phase, and both SKDE and the National Centre for Women's Health Research encourage further investigations of the findings that emerge, as well as further exploration of the significance of gender for health.

— We will follow up this report with a new, similar report from the national medical quality registers that have not contributed to this report. In this way, we will shed light on even more areas of expertise. All the national medical quality registers have a lot of interesting data that can illuminate whether there are equitable health services in the specialist healthcare system in Norway, says Philip Skau.

— By including more registers in the future, for example, cardiovascular diseases, we will have an even larger data foundation to ensure equal access to health services, says Katrine Mari Owe.