Royal college president apologises to female surgeons for “misguided” comments that undermined diversity agenda

The president of the Royal College of Surgeons of England has apologised for “gaslighting” female surgeons in comments he made about their clinical outcomes.Speaking on 14 September at a conference entitled Building Surgeons, Breaking Barriers,1 Tim Mitchell said that he was “deeply sorry” for causing “a great deal of upset” in comments he had made about two academic papers on the surgical outcomes of female surgeons, which were published in JAMA Surgery last month. Both papers showed that patients who were operated on by female surgeons were less likely to experience complications and to need follow-up care than those operated on by male surgeons.The first paper,2 which examined the records of nearly 1.2 million patients treated in Canada from 2007 to 2019, found a complication rate of 13.9% among patients treated by male surgeons, which compared with 12.5% in patients treated by female surgeons. In addition, fewer patients treated by…
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