Your Life In My Hands - a Junior Doctor's Story: From the Sunday Times bestselling author of Dear Life

(Paperback)

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FROM THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF DEAR LIFE

'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 the historic junior doctor strikes of 2016, 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.

Reviews

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
A powerful account of life on the NHS frontline. If only Theresa May and Jeremy Hunt could see the passion behind the people in the NHS, they might stop treating them as the enemy, and understand that without them we don't have an NHS worth the name. -- Alastair Campbell
I absolutely loved it this book. Such an elegant, moving and honest account of life on the frontline. This is mandatory reading for anyone who cares about the NHS. I am very often asked what it's like to be a junior doctor, and I can now direct people to this book. It's so refreshing to see someone tell it exactly as it is. -- Joanna Cannon, author of The Trouble With Goats and Sheep
Eloquent and moving... Anybody who wants to understand what is happening to the NHS should read this book. -- Henry Marsh, author of Do No Harm * The Times Magazine *

Author Bio

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 thepower 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 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 SkyNews, among others.

She lives in Oxfordshire with her husband and two children.