“WHAT WILL AFFECT MEDICINE GRADUATES THE
MOST? TUITION FEES.”
I talked to Max Pemberton, author of The Doctor Will See You Now, about his life as a student journalist and his anger over the NHS reforms. From Ellipsis magazine issue 4.
[I have since been informed that Max appeared as a medical expert recently on a Channel 4 documentary called 'Sex Story: Fifty Shades of Grey', which, if you so wish, you can watch here.]
Max Pemberton
seems to be an unstoppable force. He has degrees in Medicine and Anthropology.
He writes regular columns for the Daily Telegraph and the Reader’s Digest. He
has published three semi-autobiographical books. He is adapting his books for
television and is writing a new thriller. He has even appeared on The Jeremy Kyle Show.
He is also a
full time doctor in the NHS.
“I don’t have a
television, and I don’t have children. If you don’t have a television, and you
don’t have children, what else do you do in your evenings? You write books or
you write articles. It’s quite straight forward!”
But there is
more to Max than his self-deprecating humour suggests, and as I speak to him it
becomes apparent that the secret to his success is an astonishing capacity for
hard work.
“I think a lot
of people look at me and think, “Oh you got your column when you were 23,
that’s not fair,” but what they fail to appreciate is that I spent five years
slogging away in journalism while I was a medical student. The number of
tickets to the theatre that I’ve wasted, the people I’ve let down… You have to
be really quite determined.”
In fact, Max’s
career in journalism started not because of a passion for writing, but out of
financial necessity. In his second year at UCL medical school and down to his
last two hundred pounds, he applied for a job writing for an internet company
that outsourced news content. Then when Max left university he realised that
his life as a freelance journalist would not fit in with the busy schedule of a
junior doctor so, unwilling to give up his aspirations of being a writer, he
came up with a plan.
“I just wrote a
letter to the Daily Telegraph and said, ‘I’d like a column please. This is the
idea I’ve got.’” After an interview with the editor the Telegraph agreed, giving
Max a column in which to write about his first year as a junior doctor. It
proved so popular with readers that he was kept on to provide opinions on current
healthcare issues and has written a weekly article ever since. “I wanted to
bring out a human interest angle in the big, political stories. There would be
stories in the press about people on sickness benefits and it would all be very
polarised; then I would see people on sickness benefits and think, ‘Well
actually it’s a lot more complicated.’”
He has since
written three books about his and his friends’ early years as doctors: Trust Me, I’m a Junior Doctor, Where Does It
Hurt and The Doctor Will See You Now.
The latter sees Max returning to hospital work after a year spent working
with homeless people and drug addicts, and illustrates the incredible range of
human experience doctors encounter every day. From Tony the school child who
has taken an overdose because of homophobic bullying, to Mr Clements, who
complains that a certain part of his anatomy has started to resemble an
aubergine. One of the main issues of the book is the quality of care elderly
patients receive, especially those suffering from dementia. Through stories of
neglect and suffering Max challenges the way society views older people and
exposes the major flaws in the way the NHS cares for them.
“I appreciate
how lucky I am to have this platform to talk about the things I feel passionate
about. It’s really lovely and quite overwhelming, but it can also be absolutely
petrifying. So sometimes when I sit down to write I have to pretend that I’m
just writing for me, because otherwise I get overwhelmed with the anxiety that
some people aren’t going to like it, or some people won’t agree.”
This would
certainly have been the case for a series of articles he wrote recently
denouncing Andrew Lansley’s NHS Reform Bill, claiming that the Health Service “will
be spliced and diced into bite-sized portions to be thrown down the gullet of
the corporate sector.” I found it refreshing to see someone defending the
principle of care to all from cradle to grave, as well as explaining in simple
terms the consequences of this complex piece of legislation. “I just thought it
was absolutely disgusting and didn’t want to let them get away with it.
“I read the
white paper, which is like the government’s explanation of what the legislation
is going to do, and to me it bore absolutely no resemblance to the actual
legislation I was reading. What annoyed me was not so much that it was essentially
a roadmap for privatisation, although that would perturb and upset me, but that
they were being disingenuous about what the actual legislation was. The white
paper was all about patient choice and making things better for patients; in
fact it is all about undoing caveats that had been put in to protect the NHS so
that it can be sliced open for the private sector. It made me incandescent with
rage.”
Fairness and
honesty play a big part in Max’s writing, and he is committed to fighting for
the causes he feels passionate about. “I suppose it comes from being in
medicine: you realise that the world is inherently unfair. Some people get
cancer and other people don’t, some people get knocked over by a bus and other
people don’t. So society should be as fair as possible because underlying that
is an inherent unfairness. When I see individuals behaving in a way that is
unjust or unethical it gets me so angry because I think, well the world is so
unfair anyway we don’t need people like you!”
When I ask if
now is a difficult time for medicine graduates, he brings up another issue
close to his heart. “I think the biggest and most significant thing that has
happened to medicine students recently is the introduction of tuition fees,
which I think is fucking disgraceful.
“It makes me
worry. If you have gone through six years of medical school, and you’re paying
£9000 a year, then who will want to become a community paediatrician? Or work
with drug addicts in East End slums? People will want to go into the lucrative
areas of private practice because they’ll think, ‘I bought the degree, I paid
for it, what do I owe anybody?’”
Despite
assurances that being a doctor is still his “main passion,” the balance must
have shifted a little more towards writing as he became more successful, and I
wonder if he would ever consider leaving the hospital to concentrate on journalism.
“I wouldn’t want
to give up medicine,” he answers straight away, obviously not fazed by his many
commitments. “I did have a bit of break a couple of months ago. I just couldn’t
do everything so I took some time out of medicine and I actually really, really
missed it. I love being a journalist and I love writing books but I also love
working with people and seeing my patients, and I don’t think I really appreciated
that until I gave it up.”