With the aim of more accurately describing the diverse services their specialty offers, the department formerly known as the department of obstetrics and gynecology is now the department of gynecologic surgery and obstetrics (GSO, rather than OB-GYN). The name change was approved by the NSHE Board of Regents in May of this year and put into effect in June.
The catalyst behind the name change was, in large part, due to Dr. Nadia Gomez, MD, associate professor and interim chair of the department. According to Gomez, the reasons behind the department’s new name are “multifactorial.”
“We are a combined civilian and military residency, and the trend (of renaming) started in the military, highlighting gynecology surgery, because they needed their military staff to go to different areas, (including) rural areas, in need. They have to be ready for any surgical gynecologic need when it comes to their female military personnel as well as their dependents,” Gomez explains.
Indeed, the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences (USUHS) was one of the first institutions to push for a more encompassing name for the breadth of services their gynecologic surgery and obstetrics residents could offer, especially when deployed. In a 2021 letter to USUHS’s president, three GSO professors, including department chair Col. Barton C. Staat, MD, stated, “Our name should reflect our abilities and the utility of our specialty in the readiness mission. In the deployed environment, gynecologic surgeons can and should be utilized as preferred assistant surgeons.”
Other institutions that have made similar name changes include Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Emory School of Medicine, and the University of Munich School of Medicine.
This new naming convention undoes the widely held notion that gynecologists and obstetricians solely function as primary care providers.
“We are expected to do some primary care, which includes preventative medicine, but we are not managing chronic hypertension and diabetes,” Gomez, who completed a gynecologic surgery fellowship at the Cleveland Clinic Florida, clarifies. “It’s a surgical specialty that has some primary care in it; it’s not a primary care specialty that has surgery.”
Gomez further explains the surgical aspects of the field: “For myself, I specialize in endometriosis, and endometriosis is a disease process … at times it can be managed with medication, but sometimes we need to combine surgery and medication to be able to optimize the management.”
Specifying that their department offers a breadth of surgeries and office procedures lets patients know, according to Gomez, “what we're able to do in the office” and that they may be able to save patients a trip to the operating room.
The name change not only benefits patients, but also emphasizes the value of the practitioners themselves. Gynecology is one of the lower paying surgical specialties, especially for female practitioners. While gender pay disparity is well-documented within medicine (a 2021 article found that male physicians across the board “earn $20,000 more a year after salary adjustment”), the GSO specialty sees a particularly stark disparity, despite the fact that the vast majority of practitioners in the field are women. A 2019 article notes that 82 percent of those going into the specialty are women, yet the field is the fourth worst of 18 specialties surveyed in pay inequity among the sexes.
“I am grateful that Kirk Kerkorian School of Medicine at 51ԹϺ is progressive and a leader in diversity, equity, and inclusion reforms. Joann Strobbe (CEO and President of 51ԹϺ Health), along with Dean Kahn’s support, led a salary equity study which addressed some of the gender gaps and differences in subspecialties pay. I hope we can be the model for other institutions nationwide,” Gomez states.
While the name itself will not increase reimbursement rates, the hope is that specifying the array of services gynecologists and obstetricians are trained to perform will open up further dialogue.
