Your Life in My Hands by Rachel Clarke

At the age of 29 Rachel Clarke decided on a change of career, a starting out in journalism in television news she decided the pull of a career in medicine was too great. After all, both her father and grandfather both had careers in medicine. So now it time for Rachel to follow in their footsteps. In Your Life in My Hands Rachel Clarke talks passionately about life as a junior doctor in the NHS.

Many always dream of being a nurse or a doctor specialising in specific areas of medicine, but no-one prepares you for the real life on the front line that is looking after patients and dealing with the most traumatic moments that only a doctor can experience. Every patient is different, not every patient is understanding some can be rather rude. We ask a lot of doctors and what they have to except. Rachel’s accounts in her book are very eloquent and her writing style means that she comes across as though she there with you talking directly you. Just like a doctor in fact.

Reading Rachel Clarke’s Your Life in My Hands gives you a real sense of life working in the NHS.

Rachel worked in the NHS for eight years in total and so she has first-hand accounts of how the NHS was being destroyed brick by brick. Our nurses and doctors work incredibly long hours and for Rachel Clarke it was not unusual for her to work 70 hour weeks and the incredible mountain of paperwork that also had to be done.

What does come across in Your Life in My Hands is her love of the profession but also a warning that our loved NHS is stretched to breaking point and that if this carries on our incredible nurses and doctors will not be able to continue the level of professionalism that we have come to expect. Jeremy Hunt’s 2015 intervention on imposing strict new working conditions on the profession and the NHS as a whole very nearly broke the back of the NHS that very winter. And it became Rachel’s role thanks to her previous career in TV news that she became the face of TV interviews during NHS Junior doctors strikes that followed.

I hope sincerely that the Secretary of State for Health Jeremy Hunt has read Rachel Clarke’s passionate memoir but I doubt it. I am passionate about our NHS and the heroes that work in the NHS. I cannot praise Your Life in My Hands high enough. It you care about the future of the NHS then this is a book you must read. To Rachel Clarke I say thank you for writing this important book that in years to come may yet be a book every junior doctor will want to read. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.

320 Pages.

Thank you to Rebecca Fincham (Bigmouth Presents Book events) and also Metro Publishing (John Blake Books) for the advanced review copy of Your Life in My Hands.

Your Life in My Hands by Rachel Clarke is published by Metro Publishing and was published on 13^th July 2017 and is available in Paperback through Waterstones, Amazon and all good bookshops.