Prevalence of Bullying/Abuse of Medical Residents Ranges from 50-89% in Medical Schools

Rates of workplace bullying in medical training are high throughout the world. A study amongst medical residents in the United States showed that during their training, 69.8 % have experienced workplace abuse [6]. Similar statistics have been mentioned in other studies in North America [7, 8]. In a study of United Kingdom (UK) residents, it was reported that 37 % self-identified as having been bullied and 84 % of these residents had experienced one or more bullying behaviors [4]. Cyberbullying, an emerging method of bullying through technology such as text message and email, was seen to occur in almost half of medical residents at a UK institution [9]. In a study of family medical residents in Canada, 45 % reported experiencing a form of intimidation, harassment, and/or discrimination during their training, and over half had experienced this behavior more than once [10]. Similar rates were reported in Ireland, South Australia, New Zealand and other regions of Canada [2, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15]. Reported rates of medical trainee mistreatment are even higher in Asia and Africa, ranging from 77 % in Nigeria to 97 % in Oman [16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23]. The majority of these studies have found that main source of inappropriate behavior, harassment, and belittlement of physicians-in-training is from their fellow physicians in superior positions [6, 10, 16, 21, 24, 25]. The most common form of abuse in medical training is verbal [8, 10, 16, 17, 20, 26] and these comments are commonly belittling, undermining, or humiliating [10, 21].





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