About the “senior doctors increase death rates” part, the imho most plausible explanation the authors of the study give is the following:
Second, declines in intensity of care during meetings—driven either by changes in physician composition and practice styles, reluctance to perform interventions in patients whose primary cardiologist is unavailable, or reluctance of cardiologists to intervene in high-risk patients without adequate back-up—may produce mortality reductions [...]
Which suggests that we should develop new criteria for when to operate or that patients should ask their doctor about downsides of an intervention. When framed as a question of the seniority of the surgeons, the solution that came to my mind was to seek treatment from younger doctors (or at the extreme, to fire all older doctors), so something completely different and possibly much less effective.
About the “senior doctors increase death rates” part, the imho most plausible explanation the authors of the study give is the following:
Which suggests that we should develop new criteria for when to operate or that patients should ask their doctor about downsides of an intervention. When framed as a question of the seniority of the surgeons, the solution that came to my mind was to seek treatment from younger doctors (or at the extreme, to fire all older doctors), so something completely different and possibly much less effective.