Title: Your Life in My Hands
Author: Clarke, Rachel
Published by: Metro Books
Year: 2017
First published: Metro Books, 2017
Date reviewed: 08.17
ISBN: 978 1 78606 451 6

Rachel Clarke’s account of life as a junior doctor in the NHS is based around the industrial dispute in 2016/7 which was ostensibly about seven-day working. Reading it you will laugh and cry, and if you care about the NHS you will get angry. Clarke describes the best of the NHS – the caring, the kindness and the professionalism of the doctors and nurses. And she describes the worst – the impossible workloads, the indifference of politicians, and the tragedy that happened at Mid-Staffordshire when a caring organisation stops caring.

She is frank about the failure of the junior doctors’ campaign, acknowledging that they were out-manoeuvred by Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt’s spin machine. She is most angry about the government’s denials that there is anything fundamentally wrong with the Health Service when everyone on the front line of health care knows this is not true. She places the blame firmly at the door of May’s government and Hunt in particular.

Rachel Clarke has the advantage of having been a journalist before she became a doctor, so she writes well. The book isn’t a polemic; there are anecdotes and stories drawn from her personal experience, some funny, some harrowing.

This book confirms what I thought already; that for whatever reason this government is determined to shut down the NHS even though people will die unnecessarily in the process. Unless it is stopped the government’s spin machine will make sure that whatever happens is blamed on the fault of the medical profession and the hospitals, never the government. If you value the NHS, read Rachel’s book and get angry!

Rachel Clarke is on twitter as @doctor_oxford