Insight into the Real life of a junior doctor
Junior Doctor Adam Kay’s confessional indignities and joys of being a junior doctor in the UK National Health Service, based on diaries kept between 2004 and 2010.
The moment you set foot on a hospital ward for the first time, he realised that there’s quite a lot they don’t teach you at medical school, as he shares a few secrets that will make your toes curl. Adam Kay, Former Junior doctor turned musical comedian, writer and script editor for TV and film, who has over 20 million YouTube hits, gives a first-hand account of life and all its joy, pain and sacrifice and bureaucracy and a love letter to those who might at any moment be holding our lives in their hands, in “ This is going to Hurt”.
Francesca Main, Picador Director saw Adam’s Edinburgh show last summer, as she spent the first 50 minutes in stitches and the final 10 in tears, soon signed up the Adam Kay who had a unique story to tell.
Kay’s explains the hospital life and tricky patients and faceless bureaucrats as well being a professional lifesaver, as he put it “the hours are terrible, the pay is terrible, but there’s no better job in the world.”
His timely book, with the anxiety over the future of the NHS, Kays books reveals an insight into the working of the NHS from the embattled front line.
“You turn up every morning for ‘ward round’, where your whole team of doctors poodles past each of their patients. You trail behind like a hypnotised duckling, your head cocked to one side in a caring manner, noting down every pronouncement from your seniors – book an MRI refer to rheumatology, arrange an ECG. Then you spend the rest of your working day (plus generally a further unpaid four hours) completing these dozens, sometimes hundreds of tasks – filling in forms, making phone calls. Essentially, you’re a glorified PA. Not really what I’d trained so hard for, but whatever.”
“Junior Doctor” refers to anyone who isn’t a consultant, and it’s pretty confusing as a lot of these ‘junior doctors’ are actually pretty senior – some have been working for fifteen years, picking up PhDs and other postgraduate qualifications. “ It’s a bit like calling everyone in Westminster apart from the prime minister a ‘junior politician’.
His parents still haven’t forgiven him when last year the General Medical Council wrote to him to say they were taking his name off the medical register. “ It wasn’t exactly a huge shock, as I hadn’t practiced medicine in half a decade, but I found it a big deal on an emotional level to permanently close this chapter of my life.”
His diaries of his time in the NHS, verrucas and all, what it’s like working on the front line, the repercussions in my personal life, “how, one terrible day, it all became too much for me, as it felt extreme and unreasonable in terms of what was expected of me, but at the time, I’d just accepted it as part of the job. There were points where I wouldn’t have flinched if an entry read ‘Swam to Iceland for antenatal clinic’ or ‘had to eat a helicopter today.’ And constantly coming under fire from politicians. I couldn’t help but feel doctors were struggling to get their side of the story across while working the whole time, and it struck me that the public wasn’t hearing the truth about what it actually means to be a doctor.”
This is Going to Hurt: Secret Diaries of a Junior Doctor by Adam Kay Picador £ 16.99, 288 pages.