We wouldn't need so much resilience if our bosses weren't jerks

Through my 17 years in HR, I have noted too many clients to number that have experienced workplace harassment, bullying, abusive behaviours and sometimes even violence.

Last week, I ended up in hospital with a head/neck infection and was treated by a student doctor on staff.

Her bedside manner was amazing, she made me feel safe, heard, and cared for, and I was grateful for her to be looking into what was going on with me.

However, my experience demonstrated - in some infinitesimal snapshot of time - just how much student doctors have to deal with, and I'm not just talking about fatigue, long work hours including double shifts, trauma, emotional highs and lows on rollercoaster mode, and everything else that comes with being a student doctor. I get that that is part of the job. It's an important job - it's life or death in many cases - and you have to get it right.

I'm talking about how senior and supervising doctors talk to (or at) student doctors, how they are treated, and how they respond to that treatment.

When I was in hospital, my doctor called her supervising doctor for a consult because my symptoms were being annoyingly fickle. When he arrived, he was dismissive, condescending and rude to her and I could literally see her shrink into herself, start second guessing herself and let those thoughts of self-doubt creep in.

Frankly, I was glad when he left and took his cloud of angry, arrogant supervising doctorness with him.

Later on, my doctor needed to take bloods, my veins weren't playing ball and she was having trouble. She called for assistance and a different doctor came in.

This one engaged with her, showed her what she was doing, talked her (and me) through everything step by step, told her she would get it with practice and not to worry, and encouraged her to contribute to the process, which she eagerly did.

The contrast between the two senior doctors' approaches was like night and day.

The way student doctors are treated by supervising and senior doctors in the workplace has become of particular interest to me since I watched a X-Tree grow through the popular social media platform as people rallied to help a student doctor who had shared they were experiencing suicidal thoughts and then went silent.

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This passionately supportive group of people were able to find someone who knew her, could check in on her and help her right in her moment of crisis.

This made me wonder about rates of suicide and mental health concerns for student doctors and what I discovered was truly alarming.

Recent Australian surveys have indicated that one in five medical students reported suicidal ideation in the preceding 12 months, male physicians commit suicide at 141 per cent the rate of the general population, one in four junior doctors report suicidal ideation, and fatigue from long hours actually doubles their risk of it.

Recent work has led to changes in the mandatory reporting requirements for health practitioners seeking help with their mental health that came about in 2020.

However, it seems to be only dealing with part of the story. In all of the reports that I saw, the onus still falls to the individual experiencing mental health struggles to identify, acknowledge, and seek support to address them, without any recognition of what could be causing the issues beyond issues inherently related to them (such as burn out, fatigue, stress, etc).

In my opinion, the time to call out damaging workplace behaviours is now.

Instead of focusing solely on improving a student doctor's capacity for resilience, and accessibility to mental health services, perhaps we should also require their supervisors not be complete jerks and establish minimum expectations regarding treating their students with a modicum of respect as fellow human beings.