Your Stories

Last week I was seeing patients on the ward and another consultant colleague came up and grabbed me, shouting ‘no means no, I’ve got witnesses here.’

He knows I was sexually assaulted as a junior doctor by another consultant who confessed but in a formal complaint they said he was entitled to turn on me. My colleague behaves himself when we’re speaking but enjoys showing patients, juniors and staff a clear demonstration of his attitude to women. I’m disgusted by the GMC, their pointless statements and what they have enabled.

Over the years working in the UK as an NHS doctor I’ve experienced intermittent (and at times sustained) harassment and sexist behaviour, just as I imagine so many women have. These include physical incidents (which I have not reported as I genuinely wouldn’t have known who to inform at the time). One such incident occurred when I was working as a newly qualified House Officer and a male Surgical Consultant with no warning put his hand down the back of my trousers to tuck a label sticking out of my knickers “back-in”. This was on a ward round and I was mortified. He could have just said ‘your label is sticking out’ surely!

As an SHO working nights there was a male Registrar who would always try to steer the conversation around to sex and ask about my relationship (with long term partner) which made me feel uncomfortable. We were the only two doctors on the shift and I just couldn’t avoid him.

As a Registrar I married and got pregnant a few years later. Whilst pregnant with my first I was working my on calls as a single ‘on-site’ doctor on a small ICU. I suffered from pelvic pain early on and could not stand for long periods. I tried to plan for a change to my ‘out of hours’ work for later in pregnancy. I was told by the male Consultant in charge, when presenting my suggestion to forward plan the rota, that ‘pregnancy was not an illness’ and I should not need any adjustments.

I tried hard to work as normally when pregnant despite finding both walking and standing painful at all times. I would struggle to walk between the ward I was working on and meetings elsewhere in the hospital. I was fed back to by my male Consultant supervisor that I was too junior to decide which meetings to miss and which to go to. There were no considered questions as to why I wouldn’t manage to get to some meetings that were far away, or would arrive late, and I just took this ‘advice’ on the chin not wanting to make trouble.

Shortly after a (female) colleague noticed that I was coughing often at work and listened to my chest finding crepitations. I took time off for chest infection at 19 weeks pregnant. Shortly after my return to work (on nights) a senior male Consultant (the department head) invited me to view a patient treatment at a site 2 hours drive from base. When I declined he berated me for not taking up the offer (I would have had to drive post night shift for 4 hours for the trip on same day), saying that he would have ‘done anything for that experience when a trainee and nothing would have stopped him’. Obviously he had never been pregnant and had to consider the welfare of his unborn child in his decision making about driving post night shift.

I was signed off work around 3 weeks later for a brief period of pregnancy until the third trimester following a threatened miscarriage. I worked the last 15 weeks of pregnancy. I was asked by two separate male Consultant colleagues if I would both consider flying abroad at 16 weeks after giving birth to present at a conference and undertaking an extra opportunity at the speciality college during my ‘time off’ (maternity leave). I declined both.

On returning to work after a year of maternity leave at a supervisor meeting with same male Consultant I was told that the department had been impressed that, unlike during my pregnancy, I had not been using having a child at home as a reason not to work hard and put the effort in.

More latterly as a consultant I have found that in meetings male colleagues will talk over female ALL the time (I had thought that this was just an issue as a junior doctor, but no it continues). I have been made to feel worthless in group job planning when, after hearing from every other consultant about additional non-job-planned work, I pointed out to the chair (male department lead) that that I had not had an opportunity to present mine. I was told as chairs were being put away that they had run out of time and I should not be asked or saying yes to extra work (despite having said how much extra he did). I felt humiliated. I explained that I had been missed to the non-clinical manager in the meeting (a woman) who acknowledged this, and wrote down my additional duties. I spoke with the doctor who had run the meeting after it finished and got no recognition of the issue (I ended up apologising for being upset!).

More recently our consultant rota required a move to being in ‘teams’ to manage staffing in the pandemic. A male consultant colleague allocated as lead for our team told me ‘you are going to be my bitch’ in front of a whole room of juniors. I was shocked and said ‘not even my husband gets to call me that’. I mentioned (in passing) this incident to team clinical manager. I don’t think there was any action taken (the incident was put down to stress), and I have been left feeling annoyed with myself for not taking this further.

As a very junior doctor I was told by a senior that my place was at home. That my husband must be embarrassed to need me to work. I explained my boyfriend had an office job with average salary the senior told me I could do better. He later told me he would consider “doing me” if I wanted something better as I was clearly “easy” for living with my boyfriend. He repeated this all week while also pointing out I’d look better with more effort. I complained to the hospital after seeing him make a nurse colleague cry with similar remarks. I braved standing up as it wasn’t just me. I was told they were short staffed and they would try not to rota us together.

When I was an F2 in Orthopaedics I was the only female on the team and initially completely ignored by the Consultant. When I went to a meeting alone with him in his office he became really quite inappropriate verbally, telling me, “if it’s quiet on the wards there’s no point you coming to theatres – go home and fuck your boyfriend”. He also made frequent references to my underwear and said, “when you go for your speciality training interviews make sure you are wearing a push up bra”. Pretty soon I felt unable to work and was signed off for “depression”, which felt unreasonable to me because the reason I couldn’t work was the harassment. I decided to raise my concerns with my ES who alerted the (male) head of surgery. When I met with him he said, “Gosh, [those comments] were a bit inappropriate, Mr X is lucky you’re not a muslim or we’d be in big trouble ha ha!” I ended up making a formal complaint, with the support of a friendly male SpR, and I was switched to another department for that rotation. I was told that my new supervisor was not to know why I had been moved and I was not to tell anyone in the hospital about my allegations. Mr X went on to tell people in the department that I was mad and disclosed to people that I have an underlying mental illness (which is true, but had nothing to do with the complaint). During the complaints process (it was investigated internally by Mr X’s colleagues), my male colleagues were called in and apparently one was asked about my own background and sexual behaviour. I honestly felt I was the one under investigation. I later asked HR what the outcome of my complaint was and they refused to tell me as it was “confidential to Mr X”. I later found out through the grape vine that he was found guilty of sexual harassment and bullying and as a consequence couldn’t supervise females for a year, but that was about it. The process of speaking out was deeply unsettling for me and there was no support offered by the Trust/Foundation School, it was all hush hush. I am proud that I spoke up, especially if it prevented other female trainees from this behaviour, but if I could do it again I would have involved my union and sought advice from external agencies because I was utterly on my own with it. I am so glad more people are talking about this subject now because I used to feel so alone with this.

My supervisor would use any excuse at the start of our meetings to comment that’ I should be married by now’ or ‘maybe you should get married’ in response to any work issue or discussion I ever had. He made comments about my legs just randomly thrown into conversation: ‘ oh those legs’ type of comments on a multiple occasions and even in the middle of a BLS course when I was doing a particular skill and was being given advice by the course lecturer, my supervisor decided to heckle me from across the room about my legs. He persistently discussed his wife’s personal medical history (breast augmentation) in detail which was excruciating to listen to. In the middle of my appraisal under the working relationships section, he started ranting and typed into my appraisal the following: ‘ name has not yet found herself a husband. It is becoming really very sad and worrying now. She has tried multiple ways in which to find a man including speed dating, internet dating, asking friends, pulling plenty of randoms, etc but with no success ‘. He then deleted it. I froze and didn’t know what to say, I had never ever talked about my relationship at work as it is irrelevant to my job. I was dating someone who did not work in healthcare so it cannot have been a professionalism issue. It was pure nosiness and sexism on my supervisors behalf. None of the above would happen to a man and all this took away from me discussing important career matters.

Constantly being told when I worked/was a student to avoid specialties that had lots of out of hours commitment as women like me clearly want to have a family. My boyfriend (who is a interested in GP) has never been asked if he is applying for GP training but I’m asked on a weekly basis. Not only would he be a much better GP than me but the attitude that GP is a “softer” option makes me so angry.

A consultant refused to sign off one of my OSATs unless I went out for dinner with him.

I asked a male colleague (from another specialty) to not take all of his ward round into the room of an immunocompromised patient. He told me his was a “visual specialty” and they all needed to look and proceeded to ignore my request. I later heard that once in the room he turned to his colleagues on his ward round and said “I prefer my women simpering”.