Young Doctor Mortality: Safety Signal

Post #543

Note: this post has been edited to correct an error in statistical analsysis

In the last half of 2022, a lot of young Canadian doctors died. For the age group from 25-29, results were highly significant:

The top box shows that there are approximately 7,400 Canadian doctors under age 35. An assumption was made that half of them are in the 25-29 age group. The death rate in Canada for those of age 25-29 is in the middle box, along with the expected count of deaths for every 217 days.

The right middle boxes adjust for the fact that doctors die at age-specific rates that are only 48%-76% as high as the general population.

The bottom box shows 217 days of actual doctor deaths: 6 total. At bottom-right you can see the probability of achieving 6 deaths in any given 217-day time window. There is only a one-in-a-thousand (1/1,000) chance you’d see 6 or more young doctors die inside of 217 days.

This suggests that something is killing them.

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Data analysis was performing using a LibreOffice spreadsheet. To obtain the expected count of deaths within 59% of a year in cell V15, this formula was used:

=(U27*U15)*(X4/100000)

It multiplies the yearly “rate per 100,000” by the 59% fraction of the year represented by mid-May to mid-Dec, and then puts the population size for this narrow age group over 100,000 to obtain expected count of deaths.

To obtain the probability of 6 or more deaths in 217 days, using the uncorrected estimate of 1.5 expected deaths in cell V15, this formula was used:

=1-POISSON.DIST(5,V15,1)

That formula finds the probability of 6 or more deaths in a time interval, when the mean or expected count of deaths is 1.5.

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Reference

[doctors die less] — Mortality rates and causes among U.S. physicians. https://www.ajpmonline.org/article/S0749-3797(00)00201-4/fulltext