Alison Beatty’s adult son was in the midst of a 48-hour schizophrenic episode when he threw her against the wall of their family home.
When she next went to the bathroom she noticed blood in her urine, so immediately took herself to Katoomba Hospital’s emergency department.
There, she was treated by a young male doctor who suspected a broken rib and sent her home without completing tests that would have discovered the internal injuries.
She went home and that night had dinner at a restaurant for her birthday. Her symptoms worsened – she developed pain in her shoulder and found it hard to breathe.
Her friend and qualified nurse Jennifer Douglas was present and insisted she return to emergency that night.
They went to the same emergency room and were again dismissed. No pain medication was issued nor tests performed – until Beatty collapsed.
Beatty was intubated, put on life support and rushed in a critical condition by ambulance to Penrith Hospital. An ultrasound finally revealed the assault injury had caused her lungs to fill with blood.
Beatty was one of more than 2000 women who participated in a survey by The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald documenting experiences as part of an investigation into medical misogyny in Australian healthcare.
Dr Clare Skinner, a Sydney-based emergency physician, said the gender bias is baked into the medical canon, particularly with how pain is treated in men and women.
More recently, similar results were published in a 2023 study by Australasian Emergency Care, which looked at a cohort of patients presenting similar levels of abdominal pain and found 14.5 per cent of women were given pain medication versus 26 per cent of men.
The same study found the average time from presenting to the emergency department and receiving pain relief was 80 minutes for men, compared with 94 minutes for women.
Oh My God. The outcry for accountable medical practice can never be overempathsized. This particular story has raised my ire. Hopefully something was done about the patient’s condition.