“It’s easy to forget that doctors can spend a lot of their career feeling like they’re walking on eggshells. Society expects so much from them but can forget they’re only human.”

Dr Caroline Kamau-Mitchell, Reader in Occupational Health, has always been fascinated by the welfare of people working in medicine. “It’s easy to forget that doctors can spend a lot of their career feeling like they’re walking on eggshells,” she says. “Society expects so much from them but can forget they’re only human. It’s a career that involves great stress, trauma, difficult conversations, and often long hours.”

In Caroline’s career, she has looked to understand how these challenges affect health and wellbeing for medical professionals. Her research initially focused on burnout and stress, but later moved towards sexism and sexual harassment and the implications of such experiences for the occupational health of doctors.

In 2020, with the support of early-stage research funding from Birkbeck alumni, she collaborated with two medical doctors to produce a systematic review and meta-analysis of sexism and sexual harassment in medicine. The key findings were that many doctors across the world experience concerning levels of harassment from patients and colleagues, and that the experiences are associated with an increased risk of burnout, stress and suicidal thoughts.

Eager to translate the findings into practice and policy, Caroline organised the first ever international conference on sexism and sexual harassment in medicine in 2022: “It was about giving doctors the opportunity to speak about their experiences, as well as bringing together eminent authors, researchers, and campaigners in the field. We wanted to build a platform to share views and focus on solutions about what hospitals and medical schools should do to eradicate sexism and sexual harassment in medicine.”

After the conference, Caroline and her colleagues wrote a paper outlining their recommendations of what organisations can do to tackle the issue. This has been shared with parliamentary bodies, medical associations, and also the UK’s Medical Schools Council, which went on to engage in related talks with Universities UK.

Doctors’ unions such as the British Medical Association, and the Hospital Consultants and Specialists Association have begun working on how to use these recommendations in medical training. In the future, Caroline will hold training sessions for doctors, and help unions draft recommendations for NHS hospitals.

“It’s great to see our work impacting future generations of medical students,” she says. “There is still a long way to go, but we are going to keep actively engaging with parliament and keep giving clear, concrete suggestions of the change we want to see.”