• E-mail
• Print
• RSS

Study finds older doctors may provide lower quality care

Patient Safety Monitor Alert, February 17, 2005

Want to receive articles like this one in your inbox? Subscribe to Patient Safety Monitor Alert!

A new Harvard Medical School study-Practice Makes Perfect...Or Does It?-suggests that older doctors provide lower-quality care, know less, and may expose their patients to greater risks than physicians recently out of medical school, according to a Boston Globe article.

The Harvard team's study reviews the findings of 59 papers since 1966 that examined physicians' ages or years out of medical school when measuring knowledge or the quality of patient care. The earlier studies included age as one factor in the quality of care, but the Harvard paper is the most comprehensive look at the importance of age and years since medical school in determining physicians' skills, according to the article.

The researchers and senior doctors pointed out that doctors improve over time in difficult-to-measure ways such as earning the patient's trust, noting that age is just one factor for patients to consider. Older doctors also agreed that the increase in new medical knowledge can be challenging to keep up with, as doctors are constantly pressed for time to see their patients.

The reason that older physicians may provide care of a lesser quality is that the philosophy of medicine has shifted over the past 30 years, said Niteesh K. Choudry, the lead author of the study, which was published in the February 15 Annals of Internal Medicine. Previously, doctors relied heavily on their own experience to make decisions. Now, they depend more on research published in medical journals, and doctors who were not trained in evidence-based medicine may be slower to adopt new approaches and leave behind outdated ones, he said.

"My gut feeling is that the very best doctors are the ones who both have the experience and make a commitment to keep up with the guidelines," said Jonathan Winickoff, a 34-year-old pediatrician at Massachusetts General Hospital. "They have the best of both worlds."

To read the Boston Globe article, click here.

Want to receive articles like this one in your inbox? Subscribe to Patient Safety Monitor Alert!

• E-mail to a Colleague
• Print
• RSS
• Archive