Was Kay going to hurt the lawyers?

Award-winning writer and former junior doctor Adam Kay was the guest speaker at last week’s Society of Clinical Injury Lawyers conference.

His appearance had the potential to cause a little discomfort in the auditorium, given Kay was hardly complimentary about the legal sector in his best-selling book This Is Going to Hurt. One passage refers to the time when Kay’s conduct was subject to a potential legal claim and he describes the solicitors involved in language we couldn’t repeat here. In the book, Kay says the patient had no idea how sad and distressing the process was for him, while their lawyer ‘no doubt smoothed down his moustache, put on his concerned face and told her it was worth a roll on the dice in case it resulted in a nice payout’. 

Fortunately, Kay did not read this particular excerpt to an audience of clinical negligence lawyers, focusing most of his talk on doctors’ mental health (and the frankly shocking statistic that a doctor in the UK takes their own life every three weeks on average).

Kay did refer to lawyers once, but only those checking over his book for legal issues (of which there were many).

He told the conference: ‘The legal reports on the first manuscript were longer than the book itself. The lawyers were not happy with any hospital being identified – which is fair enough – but they also didn’t want a hospital accidentally identified.

‘I spent a few hours trying to find a name with no saint so we could call the hospital that. I’ve no idea what Agatha did wrong to not get a sainthood, but she at least gets a hospital in the book named after her.'