Watching the ABC’s Four Corners investigation into Melbourne gynaecologist Dr Simon Gordon was heartbreaking and sickeningly familiar. Stories like these shock the public, but they are rarely surprising to those of us who have spent our careers inside medicine.
Early in my career, under the guise of mentorship, a senior doctor invited me to his home, drugged and sexually assaulted me. It took years of legal proceedings to achieve accountability. Only afterwards did I learn he had a longstanding reputation for inappropriate behaviour. Later, a patient’s family member came forward with her own experience of harm.
I always knew I was not the first victim.
Harmful behaviour in healthcare rarely occurs in isolation. Patterns emerge. Warning signs exist. Yet too often they are not acted upon.
What happened to me was different in detail from these young women, but not in pattern. In both cases, concerns circulated, power circled the wagons, and women bore the consequences. My heart breaks for them. They underwent repeated surgeries and now live with chronic pain or infertility. The physical consequences may be permanent, but so too is the psychological trauma of betrayal. Patients trust doctors in their most vulnerable moments. They give doctors permission to enter their bodies in the hope of healing. How do you trust again after that trust has been broken?
According to the investigation, concerns about aggressive surgical practices were raised for years, yet patients continued to undergo procedures, sometimes despite histology showing little or no evidence of endometriosis.
This is not simply one doctor. It is the culture that too often protects hierarchy over women
It disproportionately harms women as patients and as practitioners. The patients at the centre of this investigation are women whose pain was medicalised, dismissed or aggressively treated. The junior doctors navigating these systems are often women too, working in hierarchies where speaking up carries professional risk.
Australia has a history of patient harm despite the warning signs, from Bundaberg’s Jayant Patel to the Four Corners “Do No Harm” investigation, which exposed hundreds of practitioners sanctioned for sexual misconduct, many still practising. The common thread is institutional inertia.
Those who cause harm rarely do so suddenly or invisibly. Concerns surface over time about conduct, communication, professional boundaries or decision making. Colleagues notice. Patients notice. But in systems where hierarchy is strong, speaking up is not always safe.
Too often, complaints are treated as reputational threats rather than early warning signals. Research consistently shows high rates of bullying and harassment in healthcare, with studies from sources such as the AMA suggesting workplace bullying affects between 30 and 50 per cent of staff, and sexual harassment or misconduct affects between 10 to 30 per cent. Even allowing for variation across studies, the gap between the scale of harmful behaviour and the number of cases that lead to meaningful accountability is striking.
This mirrors what women experience as patients. In 2024, the National Women’s Health Advisory Council released the first #EndGenderBias survey. It shows that two out of three women report experiencing discrimination in healthcare settings. Whether their symptoms are dismissed, their pain minimised or their concerns are not taken seriously, the outcome is the same: their voices are discounted.
The emotional and professional toll of speaking up is immense, which is why so many choose not to. A 2025 ASMOF national survey of hospital doctors found only 25 per cent felt comfortable reporting safety or workplace culture concerns to administrators. In the same survey, more than half of doctors who raised concerns reported experiencing bullying or intimidation afterwards.
Australia has more than 120,000 practising doctors and nearly a million registered health practitioners. The vast majority are compassionate professionals, but even a small number of harmful practitioners can cause disproportionate damage when systems fail to respond early.
Accountability is not only about disciplinary action after harm occurs. It is about creating environments where concerns are heard early, investigated transparently and addressed without fear of retaliation. We need systems that treat complaints as valuable safety information, that can safeguard people, not reputational threats.
Australia rightly prides itself on having one of the world’s strongest healthcare systems. But excellence cannot be measured only by clinical outcomes, research output or financial performance. It must also be measured by how we respond when things go wrong.
Investigations like Four Corners should not be seen as attacks on the profession. They are opportunities to strengthen it.
Real change requires courage, not only from whistleblowers and journalists but from leaders, regulators and clinicians willing to confront uncomfortable truths. We cannot prevent every failure. But we can decide how quickly we respond when warning signs appear.
Trust is the foundation of medicine. If those within the system do not trust its processes, how can we ask patients to place their faith in us?
Patients place their bodies and their lives in our hands. The least we owe them is a system that listens and acts before more harm is done.