"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."

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? To be a medical novice who makes decisions which – if you get them wrong – might forever alter, or end, a person’s life?In Your Life in My Hands, television journalist turned junior doctor Rachel Clarke captures the extraordinary realities of life on the NHS frontline. During last year’s historic junior doctor strikes, Rachel was at the forefront of the campaign against the government’s imposed contract upon young doctors. Her heartfelt, deeply personal account of life as a junior doctor in today’s NHS is both a powerful polemic on the degradation of Britain’s most vital public institution and a love letter of optimism and hope to that same health service.

Rachel Clarke is an NHS hospital doctor who specializes in caring for patients at the end of life. She originally studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics at university. Prior to her career in medicine, she worked as a television journalist, producing and directing current affairs documentaries on subjects such as Al Qaeda, the Gulf War and the civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo, before deciding at the age of 29 to retrain as a doctor. When the Secretary of State for Health, Jeremy Hunt, sought to impose a new contract upon junior doctors, Rachel was at the forefront of the campaign against the government, arguing in print and on screen that imposition would irrevocably damage the NHS.