Sex Differences in Emergency Care of Heart Attack Patients: Time for Action

What is it about?

Mnatzaganian and his team report a study in which they looked at whether there were differences between the care women receive when they go to the emergency department with symptoms of a heart attack, compared to men. They compared things like 1) how quickly the nurse thought they needed to be seen; 2) how quickly they were seen by a doctor; 3) whether they ended up being admitted to the hospital and 4) whether they later died in the hospital. They found that nurses gave women less urgent status, and that women waited longer to be seen, were less likely to be admitted to the hospital and had higher death rates. Sadly, we’ve seen results like this before. There are some things that may explain these differences between men’s and women’s care for heart attacks. Women may take longer to decide to go to the hospital and may have slightly different or more symptoms than nurses or doctors expect for a heart attack. This can make it harder for the doctors and nurses to diagnose the patient. But we also need to think about doctors’ and nurses’ attitudes about women and heart disease. Perhaps they need more education on this. Even more importantly, because there is now so much research showing that female heart attack patients receive poorer care, it’s time to turn our attention to trying to find ways to make this better.

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