Maggie Eisner discusses the feminisation of general practice with Amanda Howe.

Women as patients 

The feminisation of general practice is something which considerably worries me.  I would rather have a gender balance in general practice and that is partly because of gender-based styles, and how some people would like to have somebody doing a more brisk, ‘masculine’ thing.  If you ever watch videos of two men doing a consultation – it is quite different, or it can be quite different and it’s been said that the style of consultation promoted by the CSA exam was a middle class, female style of consultation, and I’ve been highly amused by videos of consultations between men talking about manly things in a manly way, but communicating much, much better than they would do if they came to see me.  So a little bit of banter about the football, for example.