“It dragged on over years, so you’d literally be sitting in a cold sweat every day just looking through emails waiting for the next message to come from AHPRA, which was invariably bad news.”

This is the view of one anonymous doctor who was interviewed for a new study by AHPRA and the Medical Board of Australia.

It carried a blunt title: Virtually daily grief — understanding distress in health practitioners involved in a regulatory process.

The study refers to the figure that shocked doctors when released this year: the revelation that, between 2018 and 2021, some 12 health practitioners subject to complaints had taken their own lives and four were “likely to be suicide”.