EURO NEWS – Many doctors and health workers are sexually harassed by patients, but they often don’t report the incidents or know how to protect themselves.
Workplace aggression is a well-known problem in health care, with doctors, nurses, and other medical staff frequently facing violence and verbal abuse from their patients.
But a specific form of abuse often flies under the radar: just how many health workers are subjected to sexual harassment, which can range from one-time comments in the hallways of a hospital to repeated altercations with a patient in the exam room.
Looking at physicians alone, that share may be up to 45 per cent, according to a major study published recently in the Internal Medicine Journal.
The analysis of studies from seven countries – the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, the United States, Israel, Germany, and Malaysia – is the first large-scale review on the issue, and included a pooled 18,800 doctors from a range of specialties.
‘Unique occupational hazard’
It reveals that even as public calls to curb violence against healthcare workers multiply, sexual harassment remains a pervasive problem in medicine – one with little recourse.
Sexual harassment “is a unique occupational health hazard, and the reason for that is that people do have intimate contact with patients because they need to physically examine them,” Caroline Kamau-Mitchell, the study’s lead author and an occupational health researcher at Birkbeck, University of London, told Euronews Health.
“That conflation by some patients of the intimacy setting, where perhaps they have to undress or they have to discuss very intimate information about themselves, does unfortunately mean that health care workers are more at risk” than people in other professions.
The latest figures are far above the World Health Organization (WHO)’s 2019 estimate that 12.4 per cent of all health workers have been sexually harassed.
Kamau-Mitchell said that’s because some types of health professionals have more contact with patients than others, which can make it misleading to combine groups, and because her analysis is more up-to-date, capturing a marked increase in harassment in recent years.
Doctors working in emergency rooms or psychiatric units appear to be at higher risk of abuse because they are in high-stress settings and could have patients who don’t know what they’re doing, Kamau-Mitchell said.
But general practitioners are also subject to harassment because they see the same patients repeatedly over time, often with fewer people around compared with a hospital or emergency setting, according to Dr Tiago Villanueva, president of the European Union of General Practitioners/Family Physicians (UEMO).
“We develop relationships with continuity with our patients,” Villanueva, who was not involved with the study, told Euronews Health. “Some patients may abuse that trust”.
There’s also a gender divide, with 52 per cent of women experiencing sexual harassment compared with 34 per cent of men, according to the analysis.
“From the male patient to the female doctor, it’s, quote, traditional sexism, or being against the idea of a female doctor,” Kamau-Mitchell said.
“But from the female patient to the male doctor, it’s a different type of sexism, of thinking that somehow males should tolerate this kind of behaviour, which is ridiculous”.
While most countries don’t report official statistics on sexual harassment of health care workers, some of the most comprehensive data comes from the UK …
