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Because the people who hold the training posts also hold your references, and complaining costs more than tolerating. RACS's own 2015 survey found 49% of Fellows, Trainees and IMGs reported discrimination, bullying or sexual harassment 1. Support: Drs4Drs 1300 374 377, 24/7 and confidential 4; Lifeline 13 11 14 5.
The measured version. The RACS Expert Advisory Group's 2015 prevalence survey found 49% of Fellows, Trainees and international medical graduates reported being subjected to discrimination, bullying or sexual harassment, with bullying the most frequently reported behaviour and 71% of hospitals reporting it had occurred 1. That survey is the reason Operating with Respect became a mandatory course and why harassment clauses now sit in every set of selection regulations 2. Nationally, the 2025 Medical Training Survey found 30% of doctors in training experienced or witnessed bullying, harassment, discrimination, sexual harassment or racism in 12 months, most commonly from senior medical staff 3.
The mechanism, and it is structural rather than mysterious. Surgical selection runs on referee reports from the consultants you work under, and unaccredited registrars depend on those reports for entry to training — a power imbalance that is documented in the surgical literature as a driver of work-related stress, bullying and harassment, alongside no national weekly-hours limit and no mandatory supervision standard for that group 6. A complaint travels through the same network as your reference. That is the whole explanation for "toxic but tolerated": the cost of speaking is paid by the person who speaks.
It is not uniform and it is not fixed. The threads distinguish sharply between units, hospitals and states, and the 2015 findings themselves triggered a Senate inquiry into the medical complaints process 7. People inside surgery push back on the caricature while agreeing the abuse is real.
What to do with this as a PGY2. Judge a department, not a specialty — ask the current unaccredited registrars, not the consultant interviewing you. Keep your own record of incidents. Use Drs4Drs (1300 374 377, free, confidential, 24/7, with a service in every state) or Lifeline (13 11 14) early rather than late 45; your union and the hospital's JMO support structure exist for the industrial half 8. And do not let anyone persuade you the behaviour is normal because it is common.
r/ausjdocs — community view, not policy; verbatim, cautionary beside positive where both exist, every quote linked to the comment.
So that surg reg that puts in a complaint about the behaviour a surgical boss is not getting another job in that boss' sphere of influence
Don't ever lose your sense of the utter inappropriateness of this behaviour. Medicine will try and normalize it out of you - don't let it.
It's an inherent risk of significantly hierarchical systems
The culture is awful and it's the main reason I hated surgery.
There's abundant abuse in surgery but doesn't mean students need to be abused too, it must vary widely on state.
Asked 25 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 /(toxic|bully|bullying|harass|abuse|culture).{0,45}(surg|culture|medicine|hospital)|(surg|hospital).{0,35}(toxic|bully|culture)/i. Quotes are the highest-scoring comments in the 2025 'toxic but tolerated' thread, chosen to carry the structural explanation, the lived complaint, an inside-surgery qualification that it varies, and the one piece of advice that is not about tolerating it.