This Is Going to Hurt

This Is Going to Hurt is a moving, funny and revealing account of life on the front line of the British National Health Service, in a profession that can demand ninety-seven hours of work a week, where life-or-death decisions are required daily and personal life is relegated to the background, with no time for friends or lasting relationships.

This is the story of Adam Kay, who used his extraordinary sense of humour to tell the story of his experience as a junior doctor. In 2010, after six years of training and another six as a doctor, he gave up the profession, feeling that the conditions imposed by the system, namely the low pay for so much responsibility, were causing serious damage to his personal and professional life.

During his time in the British National Health Service, Adam Kay used writing to relieve the pressure. Five years after leaving medicine, he decided to retrieve the diaries he had kept while working as a junior doctor to tell his story and how working conditions and a traumatic event led him to leave the profession.

An intensely funny book, with distressing details about life inside and outside the hospital, which reminds us all that the women and men in white coats are human beings too, and that society should respect them as such.