After securing a rare sexual assault conviction against a senior doctor, Dr Dominique Lee says hospitals must confront the power structures that allow harm to continue.
After Dr Dominique Lee was sexually assaulted by a senior doctor during her training in 2013, she thought her career in medicine was over.
“I left my specialty thinking that I won’t ever have a career in it because now I’m stained. Nobody will want to hire me,” she said.
This article contains references to self-harm and sexual assault. Please see the end notes for phone numbers and links to support services.
While preparing for her final exams as a junior doctor, she accepted a dinner invitation from the then-radiation oncology director, Professor John Kearsley. He said he wanted to discuss her career as part of a mentoring program. Instead, he drugged and assaulted her.
Despite the risk to her career, Dr Lee reported the assault to the police and became the only junior doctor to secure a criminal conviction against a senior doctor.
The experience left her broken, and working in medicine was a low priority.
“I don’t know if I talked about this in other interviews, but I’d always had a plan to end my life after the trial. What job I was doing didn’t really matter, because I didn’t see a long-term plan for myself,” she said.
But fortunately, there was a turning point in her life that she didn’t expect.
“I was in my mid-30s, and I thought I was infertile. And then I fell pregnant, and that just changed everything.
“My trial came to an end, and my son was born, and I just wanted to live,” she said.
Rebuilding her career
With a renewed sense of purpose in her life, Dr Lee considered returning to radiation oncology.
“One of the things that I’ve been really fortunate with in my life and my journey is that I’ve been blessed with amazing people who gave me the kind of support that I think a lot of victims don’t have the privilege of having.
“People within my circle, they just kept on asking me to apply for jobs within my specialty,” she said.
In 2018, she moved to Princess Alexandra Hospital in Brisbane as a radiation oncologist and reinvigorated her career.
“I didn’t look back because I was just so driven to catch up, and so I put my hand up to do absolutely everything,” she said.
The drive to rebuild came at a cost, however. Five years ago, she hit burnout.
“I was doing research and education, and I never focused on my own healing.”
At the same time, she was being interviewed for a book by regular HSD and TMR contributor Professor Louise Stone about sexual assault.
“Of all the women she’d interviewed, I was the only person who had survived in their line of work. Everybody else had left their environment.
“I felt like I was hit with a brick when I read that. I thought, if my story is so rare, then I need to do something about that,” she said.
For the past five years, Dr Lee has been working in the wellbeing space, running retreats for doctors to help them slow down, recharge, and reconnect with their purpose.
But she has also come to believe that individual resilience alone cannot fix what she describes as a cultural problem in medicine.
A culture that protects power
She said her experience has revealed a deeper problem in healthcare – it promotes a culture that makes good doctors stay silent, allows harmful behaviour to persist, and leaves institutions trying to fix themselves from the inside.
“The culture we were trained in has conditioned us to think that we are helpless,” she said.
As a result, those who refuse to take no for an answer and are willing to push boundaries often learn exactly what it takes to climb the ladder to positions of power. Once they get there, they expect to go unquestioned.
“The nice, law-abiding citizens remain silent. And I think this is the critical issue about why the medical culture in certain settings can be really toxic. Because when a doctor is behaving badly and their behaviour is unchecked and there is absolutely no consequence, the harm escalates,” she said.
A series of recent media reports has reinforced this. They include a laparoscopic surgeon and a neurosurgeon who both had been the subject of complaints, but regulators and hospitals failed to act.
“The issue with medicine is that the public gives us this trust that doctors probably have higher moral grounds and they’re more trustworthy individuals. But people are the same wherever they are.
“What we lack in medicine is the ability to hold powerful people accountable,” she said.
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Why institutions struggle to act
Dr Lee believes this is not simply an individual problem, but a structural one.
“Doctors often feel that they have to have all the answers.
“It’s top-down and extremely hierarchical. The only way of fixing this problem is to have a triaging system where serious matters are always mandatory reporting to an outside organisation to kick off an external investigation,” she said.
She believes the only reason she had a satisfactory outcome in her case is because it was handled by police rather than internally.
“This is why there’s only one story like mine. I am not the first victim in medicine, and I will not be the last,” she said.
“To rely on medical institutions to fix themselves is a massive overestimation of what they’re capable of doing, because there is no precedent for that,” she said.
She said hospitals and colleges often lack the power or willingness to act when the doctor involved holds status or brings in revenue.
“Let’s say you’ve got a doctor who sees a lot of patients and generates a lot of money for the institution. How can you expect institutional managers or HR to feel empowered enough to address that?
“I think this is something that we forget, because every time I talk to HR people, the doctors are put in the ‘too-hard basket’. They have their own set of rules,” she said.
One explanation often given is that doctors fall under the governance of their college.
“The reality is colleges exist to train doctors and specialists. They’re under resourced as it is to train those younger trainees, let alone manage institutional issues or bad-behaving individuals, because they would consider that to come under the boundaries of institutional control,” she said.
That is why she believes change will not come from culture alone.
A changing risk landscape
For Dr Lee, the growing focus on workplace safety and governance means healthcare organisations may soon have no choice but to confront these issues.
“Institutions have to think about their answer to WHS reform, and how we view risk, and who at is risk. I feel the risk landscape has really changed,” she said.
Updated workplace health and safety laws across Australia require employers to take greater responsibility in managing psychosocial hazards such as bullying, harassment, and unsafe workloads.
“Also in Victoria, you can’t get victims to sign an NDA at work for sexual harassment,” she said.
It’s not just changing laws. Dr Lee said younger generations aren’t as focused on the hierarchical nature.
“The new generations coming through, they’re much more individual-focused, and much more prepared to put in a complaint.”
“The new generation wants a better life. They don’t want to follow in the footsteps of the other previous people who have lived and died in hospital.”
Rebuilding trust in medicine
For Dr Lee, reform is not only about legal compliance. She believes organisations that invest in their people and workplace culture see benefits that extend far beyond staff wellbeing.
“The [environmental, social and governance] pillar, or the social pillar, is no longer a nice-to-have. Investing in culture is so important because culture is what’s going to sway the new preferred employees,” she said.
Expectations are also changing among patients who increasingly want a partnership rather than unquestioned authority.
“The groups of patients who are willing to just do what the doctor tells you are diminishing all the time.
“Patients rather want a doctor who has excellent communication skills, who understands that they (the patients) want – to be in charge of their lives – and can form that kind of guidance and partnership through their journey.
“These doctors are much likely to be highly sought-after,” Dr Lee said.
But she believes rebuilding trust will require more transparency from institutions, not just reassurance.
“The colleges or the institutions can say, ‘trust us, we’ll do the right thing’… but unless there are examples and stories of successful outcomes, people are just not going to believe,” she said.
Instead, she argues the sector needs to be more open about when things go wrong and how they are handled.
“It’s actually something to be celebrated. ‘This happened, but we managed it like this. This is a safe place’.
“I think that’s a much better strategy for institutions moving forward in the 21st century. To empower people to be better humans and show up to work has got to be an advantage for institutions,” she said.
Ultimately, she says, culture is not a soft issue but a defining one.
“Happier doctors make happier patients.
“If institutions celebrated and rewarded individuals who practice with integrity, the risk profile would look so different, even within a few years.”
If this article caused distress or if you are prompted to reach out for support, these services are available:
Doctors4doctors crisis support hotline: 1300 374 377
Doctors4doctors online resources
Lifeline: 13 11 14
Beyond Blue: 1300 22 46 36
National domestic, family and sexual violence counselling service: 1800 737 732
You can also text 1800 RESPECT on 0458 737 732, or start an online chat.
