I have been reeling after the explosive Four Corners reporting on the ABC last week detailing the nightmares hundreds of women and people assigned female at birth are living after having a Victorian doctor treat them for endometriosis.
Some have been left medically infertile from the doctor’s ‘treatment’, which allegedly involved multiple unnecessary and costly surgeries.
In the words of Health Minister Mark Butler MP, how was this doctor “able to continue to practice this on so many young women?”
This should raise important questions about protections for people to speak up on misconduct, and the costs they face in doing so.
Indeed, journalist Louise Milligan shared with Victorian Premier Jacinta Allan about the fear the whistleblowers involved in the story are feeling.
These whistleblowers are scared because Australia’s current whistleblowing laws don’t protect them.
And when people close to wrongdoing can’t speak up, wrongdoing continues, and in this case, lives are changed forever.
At the Whistleblower Project at the Human Rights Law Centre, Australia’s first legal service dedicated to supporting whistleblowers, we know this all too well.
We know from our Women Speaking Up: Gender Dynamics in Australia’s Whistleblowing Landscape report and data from other countries that healthcare, particularly, is an industry that has one of the worst ‘speak up’ cultures. Despite most hospitals having speak up policies and initiatives, they often do little to actually encourage and protect whistleblowers. This means that so much medical misconduct goes unreported.
One of the key whistleblowers in this case, who we’ll call Anna (a pseudonym), came to us for assistance. She told us, “The personal and professional cost has been profound. Whilst doctors who have spoken on the record have lived with fear of reprisal for many months, they now are able to receive the public support and reassurance they have acted with integrity. I cannot openly discuss my involvement and therefore still live with fear and carry a significant personal cost to my psychological wellbeing.”
This whistleblower went to a journalist after her internal complaints were ignored. It is important to note that none of the hospital’s employees – the people who witnessed the wrongdoing – appeared on camera in the Four Corners report. Because of their employment obligations and our broken laws which too often fail to protect whistleblowers, they have chosen to remain hidden.
But the culture of silence is far-reaching in healthcare. Even doctors with their own practices were scared to speak out. As gynaecologist Dr Shamitha Kathurusinghe put it on Four Corners, “many of us who’ve ever…tried to speak up, we’ve often been punished.” She said that it’s hard enough as a female surgeon to speak up, but being a “brown female surgeon” adds a further layer. The risks “could potentially be career-ending, lead to isolation from my colleagues and from the greater medical community.” She said she did so “because it’s the right thing to do”.
Dr Kathurusinghe and our client’s concerns are valid. Our research shows that one in five of all women who sought legal assistance from us in our first year of service worked in the healthcare sector and every single one of these women who spoke up about wrongdoing in the healthcare industry faced retaliation.
The cost of courage should be this high for women to speak up
In August 2025, we wrote in Women’s Agenda about the urgent need for reform to whistleblowing laws to adequately protect our women whistleblowers, including calling for a change in culture and for women’s disclosures of wrongdoing to be protected, regardless of who receives them.
To paint a picture of how broken our laws are, healthcare whistleblowers working for private companies like Epworth Hospital must first go to regulatory bodies like the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA), which oversees the banking and insurance sector, before speaking to a journalist, in order to receive whistleblower protections.
Yes, you read that correctly, they are protected before going to a journalist, only if they go to APRA – not AHPRA, the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency, which regulates the medical industry. While illogical, this is the current state of Australia’s whistleblowing laws. In fact, a disclosure to AHPRA would mean a whistleblower in this situation would not receive a single protection under whistleblowing law.
While our laws need urgent fixing, there is more that can be done if politicians want to restore faith in the healthcare system, hold wrongdoers to account and keep patients safe. They need to take action to provide meaningful support to whistleblowers. Speaking up should not cost someone their career, financial stability, and wellbeing.
The sad, yet unsurprising reality is that the labour of advocating for women’s health and safety seems to fall on women, whether they are patients or healthcare workers. The least we can do is to empower these women and ensure that anyone who speaks up is adequately protected. Anna has pondered why this burden fell on her, but says, “I spoke up because I could not live with knowing that this was going on and that no one could stop it. I was adamant it had to be stopped.”
Until our broken whistleblowing laws are fixed and we change this culture of silence, these heartbreaking stories will keep coming out in the media and patients will suffer. For the few brave whistleblowers like Anna who persevere, their lives will be turned upside down.