In emergency departments, female patients are less likely to receive pain medication, a bias that puts them at higher risk for negative outcomes, a new study has found. Female patients are less likely to be prescribed pain medication compared to male patients under similar conditions in emergency departments, a new study has found. Researchers from the US and Israel analysed over 21,000 patient records in the two countries.
They noted that women are prescribed fewer pain relief medications for both opioids and non-opioids than male patients. Their findings were published in the journal (PNAS). This discrepancy spans across medical professionals, with both male and female physicians prescribing fewer pain-relief medications to female patients.
“We think the consequences are dire. Pain management is one of the most important medical interventions,” Dr Tom Gordon-Hecker, a lecturer at Ben-Gurion University in Israel and one of the study’s authors, told Euronews Health. “Poor pain management predicts mental problems, development of chronic pain and return visits to the ED.
Our results suggest that women are at higher risk for these negative outcomes, due to inadequate pain treatment,” he added. They also found that nurses are 10 per cent less likely to record female patients' pain scores, and women spend an additional 30 minutes in the emergency department compared to their male counterparts. This difference in treatment could hinder the healthcare systems, according to the authors.
“The literature suggests that women tend to experience greater pain for the same injury or complaint,” Gordon-Hecker said, quoting their reactions to the same bone fracture for example. “If this is indeed the case, then we should expect women to receive more – and not less – analgesics. However, our findings show the opposite,” he added, underlining that the bias “might even be greater than the one observed” in the study.
“This is a very nice piece of work that looked at real-life health records both in Israel and the US. In both instances, it found that women were less likely to be prescribed painkillers than men, especially for painful conditions of unclear origin (e.g.
back pain),” Dr Franziska Denk, reader at the King’s College London in the UK, told Euronews Health. This study adds to a growing body of evidence regarding racial or sex-based biases in medicine. “The study confirms what is often reported anecdotally: women’s pain is often taken less seriously by healthcare providers and the world at large.
This is something that we collectively need to push back against,” she added. The tendency to underestimate and undertreat women’s pain was already highlighted, for example, in . The International Pharmaceutical Federation (FIP) dedicated a and attributed it to “gender stereotyping”.
The FIP suggested the development of gender-neutral pain assessment tools and dedicated policies and guidelines to address the gap. “What is clear from our data, is that a patient-physician gender concordance (that is- female physicians treating female patients and male physicians treating male patients) is unlikely to help, as female physicians present similar sex bias,” Gordon-Hecker said. “What seems to be key is awareness, both in physicians’ training and in their daily work routine.
Additionally, behavioural interventions such as nudges or computerised reminders might also help in overcoming the bias,” he added..
