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Get support first, document second, decide about a complaint third. Drs4Drs is free, confidential and 24/7 on 1300 374 377, with a service in every state 1; Lifeline is 13 11 14 2. Your union (ASMOF or the AMA) represents you in a grievance 3. And assume "anonymous" feedback is not anonymous 8.
You are not an outlier. In the 2025 Medical Training Survey, 30% of doctors in training had experienced and/or witnessed bullying, harassment, discrimination, sexual harassment or racism in the previous 12 months — 20% experienced it, 26% witnessed it. Bullying was the most common behaviour, and the most common source for those who experienced it was senior medical staff (43%). For Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander trainees the figure was 56% 4. In surgery, the 2015 RACS Expert Advisory Group found 49% of Fellows, Trainees and IMGs reported discrimination, bullying or sexual harassment 5.
Support is separate from process, and it comes first. Drs4Drs is free, confidential and independent, 24/7 nationally on 1300 374 377, with a service in each state and territory — NSW 02 9437 6552, VIC 1300 330 543, QLD 07 3833 4352, WA 08 6388 4904, SA and NT 08 8366 0250, ACT and TAS on the national number 1. Lifeline is 13 11 14 2. Use these whether or not you ever lodge anything.
Process, in the order that works. Your union — ASMOF in most states, or your state AMA — will advise and represent you in a grievance; AMA NSW runs a workplace relations service for doctors in training specifically 36. Inside the hospital, the JMO manager, medical workforce unit and the Director of Prevocational Education and Training are the named channels, and NSW runs a statewide JMO support line on 1300 566 321 7. The AMA's own advice is to complain under the employer's bullying and harassment policy and to get advice on your rights before you do 6.
Document contemporaneously. Dates, times, witnesses, and any voicemail or email kept in your own storage, not the hospital's. The repeated lesson in the threads is that without something tangible it is word against word.
On anonymity, plainly: end-of-term and health-service surveys are routinely identifiable, by role and site if not by name, and people have been phoned about "anonymous" answers the next day 8. That is a reason to choose your channel carefully — not a reason to say nothing.
Nobody can promise you an outcome. The accounts below include complaints that changed nothing, complaints that cost the complainant, and complaints the complainant would make again. All three are real.
r/ausjdocs — community view, not policy; verbatim, cautionary beside positive where both exist, every quote linked to the comment.
Nothing happened. Literally nothing happened. Nothing happened to the consultant and nothing (I think) happened to me.
Will that stop me from making complaints? No.
moral of the story is to have something tangible not just word against word
It's tricky to put in a bullying complaint as the bullying consultant will hear about it, and I would say it's rarely anonymous.
I used to be the person running these, and half the time (in a company of 80) I could work out who had answered from their writing style and answers.
Asked 71 times on r/ausjdocs (title-regex count) · encoded by hand from the numbered sources, retrieved 12 Sept 2026; no AI wrote any of it. how the count was made
asked_count = posts in r_ausjdocs_posts.jsonl (19,145 posts, 2022-09-13 to 2026-09-12) whose title matches /bully|harass|intimidat|complaint|\bHR\b|grievance/i. Quotes are the highest-scoring first-hand accounts in the 2025 bullying-complaint thread plus the two comments in the 'surveys aren't anonymous' thread that explain the mechanism, chosen so a complaint that achieved nothing, a complaint that carried a cost, and a person who would complain again all appear together.