One in five trainee doctors at each of South Australia's major public hospitals felt they were recently bullied or harassed, according to data compiled from a national survey.
The Australian Medical Association (AMA) SA said data from the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency Medical Training Survey, conducted in August and September 2022, included responses from 1,568 South Australian doctors-in-training, with 80 per cent of those working in hospitals.
Of those surveyed, about 20 per cent of trainee doctors working at the Flinders Medical Centre, and Lyell McEwin, Modbury, Royal Adelaide, Queen Elizabeth and the Women's and Children's hospitals reported experiencing bullying, harassment or discrimination.
AMA SA's Doctors in Training committee chair Hayden Cain said more than one-third of respondents reported witnessing bullying or harassment.
Dr Cain said "significant numbers of junior doctors" were choosing not to report bullying, because they "don't believe there will be repercussions for the perpetrator or because they are worried about the impacts of reporting on their own careers".
"It may appear that we should be relieved that there is a lower rate of experienced bullying than witnessed bullying," Dr Cain said.
"However, we believe this is not because the bullying is not occurring but that many junior doctors don't report bullying when it occurs."
Senior doctors most often-mentioned as the bully
The AMA SA said senior medical staff were often the reported perpetrators, accounting for 83 per cent of reported cases of bullying at the Women's and Children's Hospital, 57 per cent at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital, 56 per cent at the Lyell McEwin, 51 per cent at the Royal Adelaide, and 47 per cent at the Flinders Medical Centre.
"Over half of the bullying in South Australia is conducted by direct supervisors," Dr Cain said.
"Most of them aren't bad people, I think they are people working in really, really strained environments without the resource they need to support the people around them."
AMA SA president John Williams said it was "extremely disappointing" that the number of junior doctors reporting bullying by senior medical staff had increased since a similar survey of 2019.
"There's staffing problems as well on every level — junior and senior — so there's a lot of pressure on staff which it's not helping at all," Dr Williams said.
"When it is a positive culture in the workplace, patient care is better. So we really want to see some change there."
Health Minister Chris Picton was concerned about the report and said the "power disparity" between senior and junior doctors needed to be addressed.
"Junior doctors are reliant upon those senior doctors for the advancement in their career and that does make it more difficult in terms of this behaviour because it often leads to people not wanting to report that information because of fear of repercussions," he said.
"Enabling people to have the avenues where they can report that information so that it can be dealt with sensitively and appropriately to help manage that is really important so that we can help to reduce these incidents in the future, help to increase the reporting."
He said bullying and harassment have been an issue among doctors "for decades" where perpetrators feel their behaviour was justified because of the toxic workplace culture they experienced as junior doctors.
"That's a culture we need to stamp out, it's not acceptable, we need to take action."
Mr Picton said a new "peer-to-peer" model, based off research done by Vanderbilt University, was being trialled at Central Adelaide Local Health Network.
It allows doctors who have had a complaint made against them to discuss their behaviour with other senior doctors to prevent repeat incidents in the future.
Opposition spokesperson for health Ashton Hurn said the AMA report results were concerning.
"We need to throw everything that we can at addressing this because we can't afford to lose a single doctor or a single nurse from our health system at the moment," she said.
"If we're still seeing results like this, we've got to do more because it is not acceptable that we are seeing this type of bullying in our health system."
In a statement, SA Health Chief Medical Officer Michael Cusack said any feedback about bullying or harassment would be taken "very seriously".
"Any actions that could impact upon the mental or physical health of our staff will not be tolerated, and any report made is followed up and formally addressed at a Local Health Networks (LHN) level," he said.
"SA Health and the LHNs each have mechanisms in place to encourage the reporting of bullying and harassment and to measure staff wellbeing, as well as initiatives to support staff to feel safe to speak up about these behaviours."
