'Our government is meant to be 180 degrees from the last, but you wouldn't know'

The junior doctor turned bestselling author, Adam Kay, talks to Fiona Sturges about his novel ‘A Particularly Nasty Case’, how the NHS stigmatises mental illness, and having children

- Fiona Sturges

When Adam Kay walked away from his job as a junior doctor 15 years ago, he was in a bad way. He had left his position in obstetrics and gynaecology after a woman he was treating lost her baby during a caesarean delivery owing to an undiagnosed condition, and then had to have an emergency hysterectomy. Kay wasn't to blame, but the case affected him profoundly. After “a long period of lying in bed and being totally useless”, he began writing about his experiences, drawing on the diaries he had kept during his years in medicine.

Kay had few expectations for the resulting memoir: “I knew that when your book comes out, you go to a local bookshop and read some of it out, you drink some warm white wine and then go home and no one ever mentions it again.” But 2017's This Is Going to Hurt, a tragicomedy documenting the hell of 97-hour working weeks in a chronically under-resourced NHS, went on to sell 3 million copies and was turned into a Bafta-winning comedy drama starring Ben Whishaw, for which Kay also wrote the screenplay.

That Kay also embarks on sporadic stand-up tours where he performs material about his medical career means he is required to keep on reliving these experiences, which, he says, “is good and bad. It's good primarily because I hadn't had any therapy, so it meant I was, and still am, addressing and acknowledging [what happened].” And the bad part? “I think the fact that it's mostly with me. But it's my decision that it's mostly with me because I choose to keep talking about it, and to remind people that doctors are human beings who need support.”