Your Life in My Hands: A Junior Doctor's Story by Rachel ClarkeMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
Time taken to read - 3 days
Pages - 280
Publisher - Metro Publishing
Source - Bought
Blurb from Goodreads
How does it feel to be spat out of medical school into a world of pain, loss and trauma that you feel wholly ill-equipped to handle? To be a medical novice who makes decisions which - if you get them wrong - might forever alter, or end, a person's life?
In 'Your Life in My Hands', television journalist turned junior doctor Rachel Clarke captures the extraordinary realities of life on the NHS frontline. During last year's historic junior doctor strikes, Rachel was at the forefront of the campaign against the government's imposed contract upon young doctors. Her heartfelt, deeply personal account of life as a junior doctor in today's NHS is both a powerful polemic on the degradation of Britain's most vital public institution and a love letter of optimism and hope to that same health service.
My Review
Rachel Clarke was a journalist and is now a doctor working in the NHS. I love reading real life stories, healthcare and think everyone should read them to get a glimpse of what it is to work in that kind of environment. Even people working in the NHS, reading other professionals experiences is an eye opener and makes you appreciate them more, in my honest opinion.
This one is different from the others I have read and I think it is two fold, one because the author was a journalist before hand. Two because whilst the story does have some of the stories on what Clarke experiences in her work a lot of it isn't. There is huge coverage of the junior doctors strikes, the governments impact on funding cuts and patient care, services cancelled and politics politics politics.
We hear a wee bit about her personal background/life and the steps taken, sleeping and camping outside, protests and a meeting with Matt Hancock. I tend to prefer these books about the actual hospital experience so this one was different. It is shocking how many patients and staff suffer due to government decisions and how the news manipulates things to slant in favour of certain politicians or against the NHS. Bureaucracy, quotes from the news and lots of information about the doctors strike, it makes an interesting read, just a tad different from what I was expecting, 3/5 for me this time.
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I read a different book by her, Dear Life - which I think came after this one because in Dear Life she is working in palliative care. The book talks a lot about her father who is diagnosed with an advanced form of cancer. It's well worth reading.
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