All surgeons need to guard against the effects of unconscious bias A 2014 General Medical Council survey of 50 000 junior doctors in the United Kingdom found that about 8% had experienced bullying, with no significant difference between the sexes.1 Thus such incidents would seem to be much less common than among the nearly 50% of Royal Australasian College of Surgeons fellows, trainees, and international medical graduates who have reported discrimination, bullying, or sexual harassment. Any bullying, though, even 8%, is unacceptable. Why are conditions better for surgeons working in the UK than in Australia in this regard? Firstly, we have had training programmes for decades with a bureaucratic but intense schedule of scrutiny. Every trainer has to justify any failure of a trainee to progress. Australia’s training programme was introduced only in 2007, so most trainers there did not follow a structured training programme themselves, and trainees have not benefited from the same …
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", language="en", issn="0959-535X", doi="10.1136/bmj.i4682", url="http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/bmj.i4682" }