Sadly I found I had very little personal connection with Kay through his writing. This extended beyond the patients to the staff, and to the author himself. I’m sure that they are true accounts, but they didn’t always feel authentic, and that is a problem in a non-fiction book. Some of the situations Mr Kay describes are truly gruesome but, as there is no follow through on the patients-once their anecdote has been told it never really comes up again-I found it difficult to even see them as real life sometimes.

It is hard to feel sympathy for patients when you know nothing about them. That meant the emotional impact that the book is supposed to have didn’t resonate with me particularly. I could understand it and I knew it from reading, but I couldn’t feel it, as there was no connection. I wanted to empathise with either Adam Kay or with the patients, but I found myself unable to feel the plight that he was trying to convey. There is virtually no substance to the anecdotes. The book itself is well-written for what it is, but what it is ostensibly is just a somewhat fleshed-out collection of notes. On the other hand, unfortunately, I did find myself somewhat disappointed by the book as it went on. This humour fades out gradually, revealing to the reader an event-the event that caused Adam Kay to change profession. At the start of the book, humour is used heavily alongside some real hardship, which I presume was a coping strategy. On the one hand, I found that the book provided a very real look at the plight of health workers and shows what it is really like for NHS staff on a day-to-day basis, which was initially fascinating. After reading it, however, I am in two minds. Considering I don’t have a great sense of humour, this gave me hope that I would enjoy the book. I bought this book after seeing Kay on a television programme, where his renditions of some of the situations he found himself in were quite funny. The book chronicles his training through to his eventual resignation from a career in the health service to become a comedian and writer. This is Going to Hurt is a series of anecdotes by Adam Kay about his time spent as a trainee junior doctor within the NHS in the early 2000s.

This might hurt adam kay