This week, the NHS may have had its 'me too' moment.

A new report detailed how many female surgeons are being sexually harassed, assaulted and in some cases raped by colleagues.

Some of the sexual assaults are even taking place against female surgeons in operating theatres whilst those female surgeons are in the middle of performing surgery on anesthetised patients.

The scale of it is horrifying and the thought of it sends shivers down your spine.

It should be a national scandal that NHS staff are not only victims of sexual misconduct in the workplace but are then left to suffer in silence.

I have been raising this issue for close to three years after two St Albans constituents - one a patient, one an NHS employee - told me that they had experienced sexual misconduct in the NHS. Both reported that the complaints systems weren’t fit for purpose.

For one, the complaints system 'timed out' under what’s called 'the five year rule'. This means that a complaint against a doctor won’t even be accepted by the regulator if you submit it five years after it happened.

If a patient is undergoing years of life-saving or life-changing treatment, they may not have the energy or even sense of security to tackle their abuser during that time; if they can’t, then their abuser is free to continue practising as a medical professional, putting other patients at risk.

For the other, their managers had advised that it 'wasn’t worth pursuing'. She found the complaints system so opaque, and managers so dismissive, she eventually gave up.

Alarmingly, when I tried to find out how many reports of sexual misconduct there had been across the NHS in any given year, I couldn’t. Comprehensive data just doesn’t exist.

Earlier this year, teams of journalists and lots of Freedom of Information requests unearthed data on 35,000 incidents of sexual misconduct or sexual violence on NHS premises in England between 2017 and 2022.

But despite the effort, that data was incomplete, suggesting this monumental figure could be just the tip of the iceberg.

So many of our institutions are embroiled in sexual misconduct scandals. When it was unearthed in the Met Police, rightly there was an independent review.

The time is right for the NHS to have its own fully independent review and put an end to these horrific incidents and the associated culture of suppression and silence.