More than half of medical residents experience sexual harassment

More than half of first year medical residents experience sexual harassment -- and up to a quarter of those who do are women, a team of researchers has found.   However, the prevalence of sexual harassment does vary by institution, noted a team led by Elizabeth Viglianti, MD, of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. The group's findings were published December 26 in JAMA Network Open."Among a U.S. national cohort of interns, over half experienced sexual harassment," Viglianti and colleagues wrote. "Although harassment was prevalent across programs, institutional and specialty training variations in interns' sexual harassment experiences exist, thereby providing additional evidence that residency programs and institutions play an important role in combating this widespread problem."Previous research on sexual harassment in medicine has been focused on a single center or single specialty – which limits understanding of variation across institutions and specialties, the team explained. So the group conducted a study that included data from June 2016 to June 2017 from the Intern Health Study, an investigation of 2027 postgraduate year 1 residents (interns) from 28 institutions; this work is a collaboration between the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC). Participants completed a shortened Sexual Experiences Questionnaire (SEQ-S) at the end of their intern year. "Sexual harassment" was defined as consisting of at least...
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