The Black Bag Summer 2022

Review: This Is Going to Hurt The most common question medical students have been asked ever since Adam Kaye’s best-selling non-fiction medical memoir was published back in 2017. What a treat to find out a screen adaptation of the book had been released as a seven-part comedy-drama on BBC1. The excitement to start it was overwhelming; a book that spurred on (or perhaps deterred?) a generation of unknowing teens to embark on a medical career, naturally I curled up on the sofa ready to watch the entire series in a day or two.

Before I divulge any tantalising spoilers, binge watch it yourself or open the book to find out for yourself just how brilliant his story is. But for those still unaware and lacking the time to watch it themselves let me explain, the series charts the turbulent life of acting registrar Adam Kay in his job in Obstetrics and Gynaecology at an NHS hospital in London in 2006. During the series Adam is faced with innumerable challenges trying to juggle his personal and professional life in a chaotic system that is the current NHS. From broken computers and faulty emergency alarms to Adam struggling to get a psych review of a vulnerable 19-year-old patient who attempted to perform cosmetic surgery on her vulva, the series provides a startlingly accurate representation of the realities of life on an NHS labour ward. The direct juxtaposition between Shruti, one of Adam’s more junior colleagues, on her NHS shift, and Adam’s shift in private care where the staff get room service, an abundance of clean scrubs and each nurse only has one patient to care for further emphasises the underfunding of the NHS. The shock on the faces of my non-medic housemates, asking “is this really what it’s like?” or “surely this is just the stuff of fiction?” demonstrates just how desperately we need change.

What was most impressive about This Is Going to Hurt is how it explores the struggles doctors face daily in such an honest, accessible way. For example, a central plot within the series follows the ramifications of Adam’s his first big mistake. In the first episode, he discharges a patient named Erika because he believes she is faking her symptoms.

We later learn that Erika is displaying early-warning signs of pre-eclampsia, and Adam is forced to perform an emergency Caesarean to deliver her 25-week-old baby. As a junior doctor, Adam is ill-equipped to perform this surgery and consequently, Erika loses a lot of blood and Mr Lockhart, the consultant, is called in to take over. Adam is tormented by his mistake; throughout the series he sees flashbacks of the incident and eventually Erika lodges a complaint against him.

However, in watching all that precedes Adam’s decision to discharge her, you naturally sympathise with him: the day Adam consults Erika, he wakes up in his car just before his shift, parked in the hospital, having fallen asleep from exhaustion the day before.

The hospital is overrun with patients and Adam is the most senior doctor present. He is called back in for an extra shift that night, missing his best friend’s stag do. You 19