“Our data suggest that genital surgery is the most common type of inpatient gender-affirming surgery; however, these data do not include gender-affirming surgical procedures performed in outpatient settings, which likely include most chest, breast, and facial surgery,” the investigators wrote.
Surgery patients in high-volume centers (performing more than 50 gender-affirming procedures per year) were mostly self-pay, while those admitted to low-volume centers were not. “It is possible that self-paying patients may be getting higher-quality care at high-volume centers, as has been observed in other types of surgery,” according to the investigators. There is a need for national clinical and patient-reported outcomes data to assess and improve the quality of gender-affirming surgery. Gender identity information should be a part of all electronic health records and reported back to national data repositories, they said.
The investigators are supported by the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, and the National Institutes of Health, among others. They had no industry disclosures.
SOURCE: Canner JK et al. JAMA Surg. 2018 Feb 28. doi: 10.1001/jamasurg.2017.6231.