Re: Sexual assault and harassment in medicine: we need actions not words
Dear Editor
Thank you for your article which highlights the continuing endemic issue of sexism and harassment in medicine. For years we have all heard about the MeToo campaign, with professions opening up and telling their stories of gendered abuse and sexism, from the media and film communities right up to our current governing bodies. However medicine and more broadly the healthcare community have been slower to take action.
Sadly within medicine sexism, sexual harassment, and sexual assault remain common place occurrences. Most female and non-binary doctors will either have been subject to or know somebody who has been affected by this behaviour. The 2021 BMA Sexism in Medicine survey found that 9 out of 10 female respondents had been subject to sexism in the two years leading up to the survey. Another recent paper Sexual Assault in Surgery: A Painful Truth written by Dr Becky Fisher and Mr Simon Fleming started the conversation of sexual assault within surgery, creating a widespread response across the medical community. Whilst there is still much work to do to tackle the issues raised in medicine, it is likely that these are not isolated issues restricted to the silo of medicine alone. How much do we recognise what happens in medicine in the rest of healthcare? And should we deal with this in isolation in our own individual clinical professions or in fact tackle it at a broader healthcare institutional level?
In short, there is very little data looking at these cultural issues throughout the whole of healthcare. Arguably, it can be easily extrapolated that these behaviours, attitudes and indeed traumas, occur within other areas of the medical world – not only in terms of different specialities and working environments, but between different professional roles. It is a very rare occurrence that someone working within healthcare does so in complete independence without a multidisciplinary team. So surely every specialty from orthopaedic surgery to general practice, and every profession from doctors to physiotherapists to healthcare assistants have experience of this damaging workplace culture?
To confront this issue Dr Chelcie Jewitt and myself founded Surviving In Scrubs as a new campaign collecting the anonymous testimonies of survivors of workplace sexism, sexual harassment and sexual assault within healthcare in the UK. This website will give survivors an opportunity to use their voice to document their lived experiences, providing evidence to push for change within healthcare- which as you say in your article is one of the first steps to eradicating this issue. Through these powerful voices we document we will be able to fully highlight the interpersonal and institutional factors which contribute to the damaging culture of sexism in healthcare.
We want to keep this conversation going, evolving and driving change. We cannot do this alone, nor can we do this in isolation without integrating the rest of healthcare into the conversation. This has never just been an isolated doctor/surgeon matter.
Competing interests:
Dr Chelcie Jewitt and Dr Becky Cox are the founders of Surviving in Scrubs. They started the campaign following on from their own personal and clinical experiences of workplace sexism and sexual assault.
Rapid Response:
Re: Sexual assault and harassment in medicine: we need actions not words
Dear Editor
Thank you for your article which highlights the continuing endemic issue of sexism and harassment in medicine. For years we have all heard about the MeToo campaign, with professions opening up and telling their stories of gendered abuse and sexism, from the media and film communities right up to our current governing bodies. However medicine and more broadly the healthcare community have been slower to take action.
Sadly within medicine sexism, sexual harassment, and sexual assault remain common place occurrences. Most female and non-binary doctors will either have been subject to or know somebody who has been affected by this behaviour. The 2021 BMA Sexism in Medicine survey found that 9 out of 10 female respondents had been subject to sexism in the two years leading up to the survey. Another recent paper Sexual Assault in Surgery: A Painful Truth written by Dr Becky Fisher and Mr Simon Fleming started the conversation of sexual assault within surgery, creating a widespread response across the medical community. Whilst there is still much work to do to tackle the issues raised in medicine, it is likely that these are not isolated issues restricted to the silo of medicine alone. How much do we recognise what happens in medicine in the rest of healthcare? And should we deal with this in isolation in our own individual clinical professions or in fact tackle it at a broader healthcare institutional level?
In short, there is very little data looking at these cultural issues throughout the whole of healthcare. Arguably, it can be easily extrapolated that these behaviours, attitudes and indeed traumas, occur within other areas of the medical world – not only in terms of different specialities and working environments, but between different professional roles. It is a very rare occurrence that someone working within healthcare does so in complete independence without a multidisciplinary team. So surely every specialty from orthopaedic surgery to general practice, and every profession from doctors to physiotherapists to healthcare assistants have experience of this damaging workplace culture?
To confront this issue Dr Chelcie Jewitt and myself founded Surviving In Scrubs as a new campaign collecting the anonymous testimonies of survivors of workplace sexism, sexual harassment and sexual assault within healthcare in the UK. This website will give survivors an opportunity to use their voice to document their lived experiences, providing evidence to push for change within healthcare- which as you say in your article is one of the first steps to eradicating this issue. Through these powerful voices we document we will be able to fully highlight the interpersonal and institutional factors which contribute to the damaging culture of sexism in healthcare.
We want to keep this conversation going, evolving and driving change. We cannot do this alone, nor can we do this in isolation without integrating the rest of healthcare into the conversation. This has never just been an isolated doctor/surgeon matter.
Our testimony submission page can be found at:
www.survivinginscrubs.co.uk
Competing interests: Dr Chelcie Jewitt and Dr Becky Cox are the founders of Surviving in Scrubs. They started the campaign following on from their own personal and clinical experiences of workplace sexism and sexual assault.