Dr Dominique Lee did what almost no junior doctor manages. She reported a senior colleague, went to court and won. He was jailed. Yet she has told Stuff she feared being labelled a “troublemaker” and that her career would suffer for it.
That should alarm anyone running a hospital, and anyone running an organisation with a steep hierarchy. When the best possible outcome of reporting misconduct still feels like a career risk, most people will choose silence. Silence is cheap for the institution in the short term and ruinously expensive later.
A conviction that should have been the happy ending
Lee trained at the University of Otago and completed specialist training at Auckland City Hospital before moving to Australia. Writing in the NZ Herald last month, she described how the medical hierarchy pressures junior doctors into keeping quiet. Her 2026 memoir recounts the 2013 assault by a man she considered a mentor, and she told RNZ her case was the first in Australian history in which a doctor was jailed for assaulting another doctor. She remains the only junior doctor to have won a criminal case against a senior doctor for sexual assault.
One case in more than a decade is not evidence the problem is rare. It is evidence the reporting pipeline barely functions.
The numbers say Lee is not an outlier
The most recent substantive survey of New Zealand’s junior doctors, run by the resident doctors’ union in 2023 and published in January 2025, found 62% of 218 respondents had experienced sexual harassment, bullying or inappropriate behaviour over the previous two years. Senior medical officers were identified as responsible for 72.5% of bullying cases. Those who did report described victim blaming, poor communication, ostracism and inaction from senior consultants, according to the same survey.
That is the core issue. The people most likely to be reported are the same people who sign off training, write references and decide who gets the next job.
Nor is this only a junior doctor problem. Back in 2022, the Association of Salaried Medical Specialists wrote that “relatively few doctors speak out publicly, despite provisions in the MECA allowing them to do so”, citing fear of retaliation and career impact. If senior doctors with contractual protection stay quiet, junior staff on rotating contracts have little reason to feel braver.
A gap regulators flagged a decade ago
In 2016, a Victoria University of Wellington Law Review analysis found many practitioners considered notifying concerns about a colleague to be “career suicide”, and warned that the absence of a statutory reporting obligation risked problems going unreported. Ten years on, that structural gap appears unchanged.
Meanwhile the regulator’s workload has climbed. The Medical Council’s 2025 annual report showed it received 314 notifications about doctors’ conduct or competence in the year to June 2025, up 16% on the year before. The same report showed internationally trained doctors made up 43.3% of the workforce. A system that leans that heavily on imported talent cannot afford a reputation for protecting bullies. Doctors who can practise in Sydney or London will vote with their feet, as Lee herself did.
Money flows to the visible problem
The contrast with physical violence is instructive. In 2025, RNZ reported Health NZ recorded 7,777 assaults on hospital staff in the year to June 2025, a 30% rise over two years. Health NZ responded with $31 million for emergency department security and 44 extra security officers.
That was a reasonable response to a visible, external threat. But staff-on-staff misconduct has had nothing comparable. Earlier work in the New Zealand Medical Journal called for independent reporting and investigation channels and visible leadership from respected senior clinicians. None of that requires a building programme. It requires governance.
The lesson travels well beyond hospitals
Medicine is an extreme case of a dynamic every business with a sharp hierarchy faces. Law firms, engineering practices, accounting partnerships and construction outfits all have juniors whose careers depend on the goodwill of the people they might need to report.
Boards should be asking three blunt questions. Are reporting channels genuinely independent of the people being reported on? Do junior staff believe speaking up costs less than staying quiet? And does leadership treat a rise in complaints as a sign the system works, or as a PR problem to be managed?
The cost of getting this wrong is not abstract. It shows up as resignations, recruitment bills, regulatory notifications and, eventually, headlines. Health NZ has shown it can find money fast when the threat is obvious. The test now is whether it, and the colleges that control training, will build reporting systems that make Lee’s fear unnecessary for the next junior doctor. Until they do, the system is effectively choosing silence, and paying for it in departing talent.
Sources
- Stuff: Doctor feared career ruin after senior colleague drugged and assaulted her (2026-10-26)
- NZ Herald: After studying medicine in Otago, I was drugged and sexually assaulted by a senior doctor – Dominique Lee (2026-09-15)
- RNZ: Dr Yoo Young Dominique Lee – medical hierarchy hides predators (2026-09-25)
- NZRDA: Sexual Harassment and Workplace Bullying Survey 2023 (2025-01)
- ASMS: Speaking up for patients and staff (2022-04-05)
- VUW Law Review: Health Practitioner Notification of Competence Concerns – Career Suicide v Patient Safety? (2016-12-01)
- Medical Council of New Zealand: Annual Report 2025 (2025-06-30)
- RNZ: Hospital system under pressure blamed for increased staff assaults (2025-09-22)
- NZMJ: Bullying in health care settings – time for a whole-of-system response
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