The Royal Australasian College of Surgeons has worked hard to stamp out bullying and harassment of trainees since it apologised to doctors after being shocked by a 2015 report that found 49% of fellows, trainees and international medial graduates reported discrimination, sexual harassment and bullying in medicine.īut still, 1/3 of trainee doctors say they have either experienced of witnessed bullying and harassment at work. Source: InstagramĮxtensive surveys conducted by Australia's medical regulator have revealed that the culture of bullying and harassment goes beyond heart surgery and persists in almost every hospital and every specialty.
I also couldn’t shake the feeling that everyone would know the reason I wasn’t there was that I had been freshly flayed by my boss and I was “breakable”."ĭr Nikki Stamp performing heart surgery.
It didn’t stop the immense guilt that came from saying I wouldn’t be in. I was entitled to and desperately in need of that day off. "I felt dead that day: numb and immobilised by fear, exhaustion and a sadness so big that it had engulfed me. The next day, she couldn't get out of bed. Many years later, I still don’t understand why." I could hear their gasps and see the shock on the faces of my colleagues as he erupted. He had made a bit of a habit of making sure the entire room of 10 or so people knew that he didn’t think much of me. My consultant had just finished destroying me in a packed operating theatre. As each person would slowly drop out, buckling under the pressure of being treated like shit, not the job, he’d gleefully claim that he’d “broken another one."ĭr Stamp also described a brutal takedown by a consultant after she made the split-second decision to operate on one of his patients who was bleeding heavily after open-heart surgery. "He terrorised us with sleepless nights and constant berating. "I still remember, as a registrar in plastic surgery, one of my consultants bragging about how he would regularly “break” the junior doctors," Dr Stamp writes.