News
President’s Blog: #marshmellowgate
Friday February 7, 2025
What can be said about #marshmellowgate that hasn’t already been said in the past week?
To recap for those who spend more time in the real world than on social media, a New South Wales hospital administrator recently found themselves up the creek after their internal email intended for a colleague leaked to a very unforgiving outside world. In it, the administrator whinged about junior doctors wanting to put “life style before career,” and warned that in the future we would end up with a workforce of “clinical marshmellows [sic].”
Perhaps some kudos are due to this individual for coining a new term that will likely be used in jest between doctors around Australia for the next 10 or 20 years, but of course it touched a nerve and resonated with many doctors across Australia, and indeed around the world.
This single email provides validation for many doctors who have felt disrespected by hospital administration, but have not seen such concrete proof of it. Many of us have felt aggrieved at being told bluntly and with a total lack of compassion by an administrator that we can’t take leave, or swap out of night shifts in order to attend an important event or for other personal reasons, whilst knowing full well that that administrator works a weekday roster and probably has ready access to leave. We might feel that there is some element of tall poppy scything at play; perhaps junior doctors are being cut down for someone’s bitter and misguided sense of egalitarianism, but only while they don’t have the power to fight back. Based on the leaked email, it turns out that in at least one case, this has been true.
We must be fair to the many people who work in hospital administration diligently and with good intention. Sometimes they are hamstrung by a system that might not share their desire to do the right thing by the medical workforce. We should all be above generalising or demonising thousands of people based on one example of a very poor attitude. Nonetheless, the fact that this email triggered such a massive response does speak to the reality of the lives of many junior doctors, which hardly needs restating here. There continues to be a lack of empathy, professionalism and respect amongst some medical workforce departments, even if we have seen major improvements in some of our health services over recent years.
Of course, it starts from the top, with a senior hospital executive that considers its medical workforce to comprise doctors each deserving of being treated with respect as individuals, rather than as an amorphous mass of workers to be squished and squeezed in one direction or another. This is where the blame for #marshmellowgate needs to lie and where the ire of our profession should be directed – not at the level of the individual who so carelessly leaked their apparently toxic views to the world and is no doubt already suffering the consequences, but at the system and at the senior executives and indeed politicians who enabled a culture like this to exist in their hospital.
