Why do doctors silence doctors? Understanding the professional forces that prevent junior doctors from speaking up about their working conditions
Griffith University
Victoria Lister is a researcher in the Griffith Business School, workplace coach, consultant, and business owner-operator. Her PhD research investigates how the medical profession and its senior actors shape junior doctors’ silences about their working conditions. This work has led her to realise that a similar phenomenon is impacting the productivity and wellbeing of doctoral students and early career academics. As a result, Victoria has also conducted research on this topic and has two more projects in the pipeline.
To empower junior doctors and academics to find ways to resolve or speak up about their challenges, Victoria trained as a workplace coach and is currently researching and delivering a ‘coaching for communication’ intervention for emergency medicine clinicians. She also works on other research projects in the emergency medicine context – on clinician-coaches and their coaching experiences, leadership challenges and leader identity formation.
Prior to her PhD, Victoria was a management, governance, and marketing consultant working with small-to-medium enterprises in the nonprofit sector. More recently, she has consulted on a healthcare workforce wellbeing initiative and a cultural change program designed to address bullying, harassment and discrimination in medicine. Victoria also operates a micro-business she founded in 2015, producing women’s under and outerwear for retail online.
Victoria and I had a far-reaching conversation about challenges that are faced in all fields of work and study, but especially those that are idiosyncratic to healthcare and our common field of academia. You’ll hear us try to maintain optimism and buoyancy as we unpack these issues. Ultimately, I think we arrive in a hopeful place and I hope you enjoy listening to it unfold.
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This episode of The Knowledge Mill was recorded on the Nathan Campus of Griffith University in Brisbane on June 9, 2025.
Show Notes
This Is Going To Hurt by Adam Kay
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