Your Life In My Hands: A Junior Doctor's Story by Rachel Clarke

'I am a junior doctor. It is 4 a.m. I have run arrest calls, treated life-threatening bleeding, held the hand of a young woman dying of cancer, scuttled down miles of dim corridors wanting to sob with sheer exhaustion, forgotten to eat, forgotten to drink, drawn on every fibre of strength that I possess to keep my patients safe from harm.'

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.

Review

From the very heart of the NHS comes this brilliant insight into the continuing crisis in the health service. Rachel Clarke writes as the accomplished journalist she once was and as the leading junior doctor she now is - writing with humanity and compassion that at times reduced me to tears. -- Jon Snow

Dr Clarke has written a blockbuster, a page-turner, a tear-jerker. This is a "from-the-heart" front-line account of the human cost of the wanton erosion of a magnificent ideal - healthcare free at the point of need, funded through public taxation, available to all - made real in the UK for near 70 years. It is a love-song for the wonderful National Health Service that has embodied - to an extent equalled nowhere in the world - the principle that healthcare is not a commodity but a great duty of state. -- Prof. Neena Modi, President of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Metro Publishing (30 Nov. 2017)

Language ‏ : ‎ English

Paperback ‏ : ‎ 320 pages

ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1786068656

ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1786068651

Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 12.7 x 1.7 x 19.7 cm

Customer reviews: 4.3 4.3 out of 5 stars    1,937 ratings

About the Author

Before going to medical school, Dr Rachel Clarke was a television journalist and documentary maker. She now specialises in palliative medicine, caring deeply about helping patients live the end of their lives as fully and richly as possible - and in the power of human stories to build empathy and inspire change.

Her first book, the Sunday Times bestselling YOUR LIFE IN MY HANDS, reveals what life is like for a junior doctor on the NHS frontline. Her forthcoming memoir DEAR LIFE (Little, Brown, Jan 2020) is based on her work in a hospice. It explores love, loss, grief, dying and what really matters at the end of life.

Rachel has written for the Guardian, Sunday Times, New York Times, Independent, Telegraph, Prospect, BMJ, NEJM and Lancet. She has appeared on BBC Radio 4 Today, BBC Newsnight, Channel 4 News, BBC Woman's Hour, ITV News and Sky News, among others.

She lives in Oxfordshire with her husband and two children.

www.doctoroxford.com

@doctor_oxford