And probably twice as likely to use the f-word, judging by the expletives found here. In so doing, Kay sidesteps the archetype of the doctor as a noble saviour and instead demonstrates that doctors are just as prone to stupidity, vanity, and inanity as the rest of us.

Stories of missed social appointments, sleeping in hospital car parks, and being undermined by consultants are interspersed with amusing anecdotes of patients that presented to Kay in his various roles, but also bruising moments where the outcomes were not what doctor or patient desired. The trust's IT department has blocked the Royal College of Obstetrics and Gynaecology website and classified it as 'pornography'.'). Instead, Kay’s narrative is a cheeky – arguably cocky – look at the pressures and the pleasures of being a junior doctor and some of the small absurdities of working in the NHS ('In gynae clinic, I go online to look up some management guidelines for a patient. What a money-grabbing upstart.īut while This is Going to Hurt might have been born of a political struggle, Kay manages to make it a very human memoir that doesn’t overburden the reader with the message that, you know, the NHS is being propped up by the good will of its staff and any Health Secretary is ill-advised to disregard this fact. Not least when, calculating his own wage, he discovered that, taking into account the additional hours he worked daily, he was earning less per hour than a McDonalds shift supervisor, and certainly less than the hospital parking meter. If the campaign to paint junior doctors as money-hungry elites who were selfishly striking while patients needed them had gained any traction at all, Kay’s inside scoop on life in the NHS dispelled a few myths. A former doctor, Kay had been recounting his experiences of the NHS (based on his personal diaries) for laughs at the Edinburgh Fringe as part of his new career as a comedian, when, seeing the pasting former colleagues were taking in the press, he decided to turn his show into a memoir of life as a junior doctor. It is not unusual for NHS workers to decry the performance of the Health Secretary but it is rare to see the Government – followed by some of the media – push back as hard. In 2015-2016, junior doctors were entrenched in a war of words with the Health Secretary, Jeremy Hunt, leading to an unprecedented series of strikes.

This is going to hurt by adam kay