Nearly half of doctors are being sexually harassed by patients! What the latest study found
2024-09-16 19:34:08
TiranaPost
Many doctors and health workers are sexually harassed by patients, but they often do not report the incidents or do not know how to protect themselves.
Workplace aggression is a well-known problem in healthcare, where doctors, nurses and other medical staff often face violence and verbal abuse from their patients.
But one specific form of abuse often flies under the radar: how many health workers are sexually harassed?
That percentage could be as high as 45 percent, according to a large study recently published 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 group of 18,800 doctors from a range of specialties.
It reveals that although public calls to curb violence against healthcare workers have increased, sexual harassment remains a widespread problem among doctors.
Sexual harassment "is a risk at work, and the reason for that is that people have intimate contact with patients because they have to physically examine them," said Caroline Kamau-Mitchell, the study's lead author.
The latest figures are much higher than the World Health Organization (WHO) estimate for 2019 that 12.4 percent of all health workers have been sexually harassed.
