Dr Rachel Clarke asks: Is speaking out a core duty of a doctor?

Rachel is an NHS palliative care doctor and the author of three Sunday Times bestselling non-fiction books about medicine. Breathtaking (2021) – now adapted as a major ITV television series – reveals how she and her colleagues confronted the first wave of Covid-19 in 2020. Dear Life (2020), depicting her work in an NHS hospice, was shortlisted for the 2020 Costa Biography Award, long-listed for the 2020 Baillie Gifford Prize and chosen as a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week. Your Life in My Hands (2017) documents life as a junior doctor. Before going to medical school, Rachel was a broadcast journalist. She produced and directed current affairs documentaries focusing on subjects such as Al Qaeda, the Iraq War and the civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo. She continues to write regularly for the Guardian, Sunday Times, New Statesman, Lancet and BMJ among others.
Inspired by a visit to Ukraine during the conflict in late 2022, she recently founded a registered charity, Hospice Ukraine, supporting the work of palliative care teams in Ukraine.