Your Life in My Hands by Rachel Clarke Metro Books £16.99
With the harrowing Covid drama written by doctor and writer Rachel Clarke and ex junior doctor and TV writer/producer Jed Mercurio fresh in many of our minds, I thought I would share a review I wrote but never published on Clarke’s 2017 book about the NHS.
The junior doctors’ strike in 2016 was the first time in the history of the NHS that doctors had downed their stethoscopes and refused to work. One of the junior doctors who was most active and vocal in articulating the discontent of Britain’s junior doctors at the time was Rachel Clarke, an Oxford-based trainee whose interest in politics and eloquence had been honed as a journalist prior to entering medical school.
This book is her cri de couer about the state of the NHS, and the folly of the Conservative government’s underfunding of it, which, she argues, has turned the NHS from a national treasure to a catastrophe in waiting, kept going only by the goodwill of its staff, who regularly take on workloads that are unsafe, both for their own health, and perhaps more alarmingly, for the vulnerable patients in their care.