More than a third of UK medical students do not receive sexual misconduct training, research has found.
The study by researchers at the University of Cambridge, published by JRSM Open, found that almost half of medical schools offered no training or only generalised harassment training that was not specific to sexual misconduct or that was wholly outside the context of being a doctor.
Analysing responses from the UK’s 34 medical schools to freedom of information requests, the research found there was no standardisation of training on sexual misconduct across medical universities.
“Graduates from more than one-third of schools in the UK are leaving their medical training without being educated on sexual misconduct and the medical profession anywhere in their degrees. It cannot be assumed, therefore, that graduates who are working as junior doctors have received training on sexual misconduct before starting their NHS roles,” the authors write.
They say medical students, as future clinicians, have a crucial and strategic need for education that allows them to perform a critical role in exhibiting good behaviour, and intervening, identifying, assessing and reporting sexual misconduct when they see it happening at work or in wider society.
The findings come as a separate study found that nearly one in three female surgeons working in the NHS had been sexually assaulted in the past five years. That study, commissioned by the Working Party on Sexual Misconduct in Surgery – a group of NHS surgeons, clinicians and researchers – also found that 29% of women had experienced unwanted physical advances at work, more than 40% had received uninvited comments about their body and 38% said they had received sexual “banter” at work.
