Yet, even in the midst of despondence, Clarke expresses heartfelt gratitude towards her country’s health service for its collective decision to “provide healthcare without charge to those in need”. In Your Life in My Hands, television journalist turned junior doctor Rachel Clarke captures the extraordinary realities of life on the NHS frontline. How can they still be expected to perform delicate operations requiring sharp focus, steady hands and fastidious precision? Your Life in My Hands continuously praises the work of the doctors and healthcare teams in England, and shows the dedication and compassion needed by the teams to continue to come to work and save lives, even when they feel that the government is working against them. Welcome back. But the repetitive tirade became tedious in book form. Although I do recognise that its angry tone is completely justified, it would have been nice to see more constructive criticism instead of just scathing criticism. Yet, according to Lawson, our predisposition to avoid antisocial hours and put family before career means we are more”, “the most frightening experience of my professional life was not those hours spent under fire in Congo’s killing fields but my first night on call in a UK teaching hospital.”. Perhaps it is only when you or your family are smitten that you fully appreciate - with relief and gratitude - that the NHS is there, ready and willing to scoop up your loved one and put them back together again, without a punitive bill attached. In ‘Your Life in My Hands’, television journalist turned junior doctor Rachel Clarke captures the extraordinary realities of life on the NHS frontline. Get this from a library! They say: "We are large like your father's hands." While it was a seemingly trivial act for the nurse to set aside her duties and sit with Clarke for some time, it meant the world to a desolate and frightened new mother. Summary/Thoughts:. While it is no fault of the individual, it can seem to some doctors like a personal failure. I completely understand her desire to leave medicine when she felt she wasn’t doing a good enough job and was letting her patients down. Doctors are humans too—like everyone else, they need rest and time to recuperate. I feared that, if my hours and workload continued as they were, I might fail to cling onto the one thing that had driven me into medicine in the first place: my compassion. Therefore, continuing to uphold the values of the NHS while not subjecting its workers to further stress will provide the crucial anchorage for a better future. Start by marking “Your Life in My Hands: A Junior Doctor's Story” as Want to Read: Error rating book. Medical professionals place patients at the heart of their work and leaving them vulnerable to deterioration in their absence is a huge risk that no doctor would willingly take. A Junior Doctor’s Story. When I fall asleep my hands leave me. Summary and Analysis. In Your Life in My Hands, television journalist turned junior doctor Rachel Clarke captures the extraordinary realities of life on the NHS frontline. … Definitions by the largest Idiom Dictionary. Take your life in your hands - Idioms by The Free Dictionary. I truly enjoyed the medical stories; however, there was a bit too much politics to me. I think we often forget that doctors are human, too, in our desire for them to provide clear diagnoses and to make us well. An unflinching exploration of the various problems that are plaguing the NHS at present. 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.' "Cancer, heart attacks, car crashes, brain damage - we know the bolts from the blue are out there, we just never believe it is us they will strike. During last year’s historic junior doctor strikes, Rachel was at the forefront of the campaign against the government’s imposed contract upon young … take your life in your hands phrase. The boy realized that the wise woman had once again spoken correctly and truthfully. Without their health, the health of the rest of the nation will falter. Rachel Clarke. Despite the collective uproar of Britain’s junior doctors towards the mendacious proclamations uttered by their country’s Health Secretary and broadcasted to the nation, they had to stage massive campaigns to gain public support and make their voices heard. MY LIFE IN MY HANDS is Alison's story: from her mother's rejection at birth, through a childhood deprived of affection in children's homes, to independence, a first class art degree, motherhood and critical success. This extraordinary memoir offers a glimpse into a life spent between the operating room and the bedside, the mortuary and the doctors' mess, telling powerful truths about today's NHS frontline, and capturing with tenderness and humanity the highs and lows of a new doctor's first steps onto the wards in the context of a health service at breaking point - and what it means to be entrusted with … Unsurprisingly, this book made its way into my life through the Oxford Medicine Introductory Reading List. The unjust connotations that made the lapse in patient safety seem like the fault of junior doctors were also deeply disturbing. Hands"". I completely understand her desire to leave medicine when she felt she wasn’t doing a good enough job and was letting her patients down. But that presumption, it turned out, was a glib one – itself a failure of imagination. Free shipping for many products! Tinted with a mixture of worry and optimism, this personal account promulgates a sense of hope for an increasingly battered and underfunded health service. After all, both her father and grandfather both had careers in medicine. A former resident of Poland tells her experiences first helping rescue Jews from Hitler’s regime then as a partisan fighter for Poland during the time of World War II in the book “In My Hands” by Irene Gut Opdyke. “Women, as we know, used to be judged incapable of medicine. While it is true that technical expertise is an essential prerequisite of becoming a qualified doctor and saving lives, there is another element which is equally indispensable—the unreserved and genuine display of empathy and understanding. These hands, though wrinkled, shriveled and weak have been the tools I have used all my life to reach out and grab and embrace life. In his Memoirs, Anderson tells about the first reactions to Winesburg, Ohio when it was published in 1919. I got hold of it because I'd read a review of Clarke's latest book. This review was originally posted on Waterstones.com. 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.'. Many always dream of being a nurse or a doctor specialising in specific areas of medicine, but no-one 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. I don't want to take anything away from the writing or the message which are both fluent and interesting - for a few chapters. Your Life in My Hands Author: Rachel Clarke Synopsis Written with intense feeling, this book offers an insight into the direct impact of political decisions on the work and lives of doctors, and the patients they care for. A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality study guides that feature detailed chapter summaries and analysis … They are not and should not be treated as working machines capable of withstanding back-to-back overnight shifts with minimal time to sleep, let alone time to spend with family. '. What is it with politicians that they don't want to consider, appreciate, believe views from the coalface? Not being from Britain myself, I found Your Life in My Hands a refreshing read as it unveiled much about the National Health Service (NHS) that I had not been fully aware of before. To see what your friends thought of this book, Your Life in My Hands: A Junior Doctor's Story. Overall, the book conveyed some new information and great sympathy for junior doctors but it came from a narrow perspective. While Clarke’s enthusiasm for her work is infectious, her polemical memoir Your Life in My Hands reveals the gap between those who dream of being a doctor and the real life experience. I truly admire Clarke’s patient-centred approach to her work and like her, I aspire to be a doctor who can make patients feel loved and understood. The very fact that doctors would abandon their patients to go on strike was enough to highlight their desperation and fierce opposition towards the proposed contractual changes. 2017. I regarded myself as reasonably empathetic and thought I could imagine what grieving must feel like. This is echoed by 2018 TV programmes like 'Ambulance' and 'Hospital' as well as friends working in high pressurised NHS environments where firefighting is all they are managing to do. I felt Rachel Clarke’s pain, frustration, fear and sheer exhaustion throughout the book when she so often found herself out of her depth. Many excellent medical memoirs have made their way onto bookshelves of late (Do No Harm, Being Mortal) and this is an addition to that worthy list. How can they still be expected to remain kind and cheerful, and not to break down under the sheer weight of emotion? To me, this is sufficient to evince the enormity of the political decisions that were being made at the time. “The unexamined life is not worth living”. Her resilience, fortitude and humour are humbling, yet she rejects any notion of 'bravery'. This struck a cord with me on a personal level as I'm currently an allied health professional working within the NHS on the 'frontline', and I've also recently been on the other side of care as an inpatient myself. But yet, just because you find yourself in the hands of the Lord, that does not mean that everything will all be rosy and smooth for you. A good insight of the NHS and it's cracks. Perhaps I'm biased because I am a nurse (although I did elect to leave the NHS earlier this year for reasons not dissimilar to those documented here) but I thought this was a brilliantly articulate book. Rachel Clarke is a self-proclaimed Junior Doctor activist who gives an articulate account of the issues that led to the junior doctors' strike. I felt Rachel Clarke’s pain, frustration, fear and sheer exhaustion throughout the book when she so often found herself out of her depth. Socrates. We’d love your help. Such an act of compassion filled the wards with a palpable warmth and was especially uplifting for patients who had been forsaken by their families. 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