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

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My times are in Your hand; Deliver me from the hand of my enemies, And from those who persecute me. Firstly the narrator cannot pronounce words such as telephonist and Agence France Presse, amongst countless others. Her voice has an annoying patronising tone. The writer tries to paint herself as struggling to pay herself through med school, neglecting to be honest about being married to a fighter pilot at the time. This isn't a poor single woman modestly paying her way. She's the third generation of a well to do medical family with ample support and funds. That's fine but don't paint a picture that is different from the reality of a privileged public school girl, immersed in the medical world from birth, who was fortunate enough to have husband and family to support her to become a doctor after a brief career in journalism.

Breathtaking is a scorching corrective to any suggestion that the pandemic is a hoax and that empty hospital corridors imply deserted intensive care units . . . Written at pace as "a kind of nocturnal therapy" on sleepless nights, Clarke's book has all the rawness of someone still working in the eye of the storm ― Mirror To toughen up the hard way, through repeated exposure to life-and-death situations, until you are finally a match for them?

Clarke, who comes from four generations of doctors, is a skilful writer and her passion for her profession shines through the many personal, moving and unsettling stories of life on the front line. One patient with cancer is told with extraordinary tenderness that she is going to die; another makes an astonishing recovery when all seemed futile. And there is a very intimate description of death itself. While I am personally not inclined to take any sides in such conflicts without a more complete understanding of the situation, I am nevertheless appalled by the Health Secretary’s avoidance of frank conversations with the people whom his policies will most directly affect. The unjust connotations that made the lapse in patient safety seem like the fault of junior doctors were also deeply disturbing. Until I faced the prospect of losing a child, I didn’t know what grief was. I regarded myself as reasonably empathetic and thought I could imagine what grieving must feel like. But that presumption, it turned out, was a glib one – itself a failure of imagination.

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.’ Why does the Almighty not reserve times for judgment? Why may those who know Him never see His days? This shows that medicine can never operate efficiently on an individual level; it takes a well-organised and system to keep the profession going. While individual healthcare workers often enter the profession with the best intentions at heart, their idealism can soon be crushed by the weight of responsibility in underfunded, understaffed hospitals, where speaking up to seniority is equated with blatant disrespect. This culture of silence, compliance and submission that seems to be a subsidiary trait of the hierarchical nature of medicine only perpetuated the establishment of an increasingly brutal culture, where patients can no longer receive quality care. The Health of the Medical Workforce My times are in your hand. Deliver me from the hand of my enemies, and from those who persecute me.And when thy days be fulfilled, and thou shalt sleep with thy fathers, I will set up thy seed after thee, which shall proceed out of thy bowels, and I will establish his kingdom. 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. a decade after we faced the abyss, the compassion and humanity of one NICU nurse remain indelibly etched in my memory. Clarke has written the UK's human story of Covid. Weaving together stories of patients, families, nurses, doctors and paramedics as the virus spread from New Year's Day to the end of April 2020. She reveals the desperate times and the government's mistakes but also how people from all walks of life - inside the NHS and out - have tried to reach out and show goodness to one another ― Stylist

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?My lots are in thy hands. Deliver me out of the hands of my enemies; and from them that persecute me. In the long run, without proper measures to ease the burden on overstretched doctors, patient care will be severely compromised. Not only that, doctors and nurses can succumb to mental health problems precipitated by stress, anxiety and guilt at not being able to deliver the quality of care that their patients deserve. While it is no fault of the individual, it can seem to some doctors like a personal failure.

While the political aspects of the junior doctor dispute are riveting and enlightening, the parts of the book that left the deepest impression on me are those in which Clarke recounts the human experiences that have continuously reinforced her faith in medicine and its healing power.It is a well-known fact, referred to in Rachel Clarke’s eloquent and moving account of her life as a junior doctor, that candidates at interviews for medical school should never say that they want to help people. Instead, you must use a code — talk about wanting to make a difference, or of finding medicine and disease fascinating, or your love of using your hands. Yet, when she finally emerged as a junior doctor at over thirty years of age and entered into the profession she had pursued with fervour, she became disillusioned by the punishing workload and Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt’s unjust accusations towards junior doctors for failing to deliver an exemplary standard of care and a seven-day NHS. Despite being at the lowest position in the hierarchy of the medical profession, Clarke, like many other junior doctors, felt the need to speak up and voice her concerns. This led her to adopt a leading role in the activism against the proposed junior doctors’ contract. Through it all, she stayed true to the prioritisation of patient care and expressed her deep attachment and loyalty to the NHS, which threatened to be upended by unreasonable governmental policies. Tinted with a mixture of worry and optimism, this personal account promulgates a sense of hope for an increasingly battered and underfunded health service. Reflections The Distinctiveness of Britain’s Health System This book has also allowed me to see that medicine is essentially inseparable from politics. No matter how much doctors wish to be independent, they still fall under the subjugation of government bureaucracy and their choices are still influenced by political imperatives.