ON A knife's EDGE

A toxic culture of bullying, overwork, sexism and harassment is devastating young female doctors – sometimes to a fatal end. Why is medicine failing its future workforce of women? Alexandra Carlton reports

- Alexandra Carlton

On the first of June 2018, plastic surgery registrar Yumiko Kadota was driving to Bankstown-Lidcombe Hospital in western Sydney, where she had been spending nearly every waking hour – and many fitfully sleeping ones – since February. It wasn’t unusual for her to be working 120 to 140 hours a fortnight at the hospital, and when she wasn’t, she was on call, sometimes for eight days in a row, with phone calls waking her up at all hours of the night.

Thirty-year-old Kadota was not the sort of person to take her foot off the gas. She loved the challenge of complicated surgery with its unique nexus of creativity and skill, and the satisfaction of knowing the positive difference it could make to a patient’s life when it was done well. This was a woman who placed third in her anatomy class at the University of New South Wales and ran marathons in her spare time. Toughness and resilience came naturally to her. But not even Wonder Woman – a nickname Kadota had among her friends – could keep going like this. She knew she wasn’t coping. The exhaustion was suffocating. She was dehydrated and undernourished from eating nothing but hot chips or banana bread at the hospital canteen in those rare moments when she could spare a minute to put something into her body.