Collaborative research out of the University of Glasgow and Australian National University, has found that one-third of junior doctors have experienced sexual harassment and abuse (SHA) within their healthcare system.
The research anthology is expected to help tackle the root causes of sexual harassment and abuse in medicine, and find potential solutions.
‘Sexual harassment between doctors: Healing medical cultures around the world’ identifies key ways to help prevent SHA in healthcare settings, including:
- Interventions that can be made during selection and training,
- The role of men in allyship, leading and supporting teams in the prevention and management of sexual harassment,
- Changes to the way hierarchy is managed and the nature and structure of medical work, and
- Changes to the management of learning environments to ensure doctors in training are safe.
The anthology is out in January 2026 and available to order from Cambridge University Press.
Education Critical
Co-editor Professor Rosalind Searle, of the University of Glasgow’s Adam Smith Business School, is working with NHS England and health and social care regulators to educate and introduce workplace interventions to prevent, reduce the impact of, and minimise the harms of sexual harassment.
“Sexual harms between doctors is a complex problem, but not unsolvable,” she said. “This is an institutional issue. Medicine is a patriarch, where your means to progress within your career depends on somebody else endorsing you. That therefore allows people to exploit others unnecessarily, promote those that favour them and shut out people that challenge their behaviours.”
We sincerely believe that it is only by engaging with the complexity of the problem that contextually appropriate solutions can be found across the world
Prof Searle continued, “Harassment is more common when the target is still in training, and it is more likely to be experienced by doctors who live with multiple marginalisations.
“Our work gives a nuanced and holistic understanding of sexual harms, and demonstrates how silence prevents effective evidence-based management of sexual harassment.”
Professor Louise Stone from Australian National University said the aim of the research was “to bring the insights of multiple disciplines and multiple contexts into one space so those of us involved in the complex problem of sexual abuse in medicine could examine the problem from multiple perspectives”.
“We sincerely believe that it is only by engaging with the complexity of the problem that contextually appropriate solutions can be found across the world.”
Further information about their approach to the project can be found here.
A Global Approach
With contributing authors in locations from Austria to Zambia, the book spans multiple languages, sociocultural contexts, and academic disciplines and offers unique globally contextualised perspectives, expert analysis and commentary. It prioritises the voices of targets, whose experience helps to inform an understanding of a complex problem. This not only helps to break the silence, but offers potential solutions in discrete cultural contexts.
This work brings into one place expertise and experience from law, medical regulation, management, human rights, gender theory and therapy from across the world to understand how systems adapt, as well as revealing the systems that enable abuse to occur in large health care institutions.
A series of animations summarising understandings from the book have been developed for staff training by the United Kingdom’s National Health Service:
