Crick Doctoral Clinical Fellow has published a book about his experiences in the NHS. The below is taken from a recent article published in the Guardian. 

Are You Really the Doctor?, Matthew Hutchinson’s memoir of being a black doctor in the NHS, opens in A&E with a patient suffering from a thunderclap headache and taking time out from his excruciating pain to complain that Hutchinson is “very scruffy”.

“I’m wearing scrubs, the pyjama-like, hospital-issue uniform – something pretty difficult to put your own personal flair on,” Hutchinson writes, concluding wearily that the guy must have been reacting to something else: “Skin, hair, or general … vibe.” You couldn’t call it a microaggression, the patient’s assumption that, being black, Hutchinson was unlikely to be an expert.

But this anecdote barely registers on the Geiger counter of bigotry in healthcare that Hutchinson writes about trenchantly and acerbically, from the prejudices doctors face from patients and the gender and race blindspots in medical textbooks, to the racism that could endanger a patient’s life (black women are four times more likely to die during childbirth).

Hutchinson’s parents were both biochemists, now retired, and his younger brother is an anaesthetist. His dad arrived in Birmingham from Jamaica aged 19; his mother is Scottish. He grew up in south-east London, where he still lives, in an area that has gone from rough-with-leafy-pockets to only-just-affordable-on-two-doctors’-salaries.

Nowadays, Hutchinson spends three days a week in his clinic, and two days researching rheumatology and internal medicine at the Crick Institute in King’s Cross. If he has any nerves about the book coming out, it’s mainly whether or not cardiologists can take a joke. Being involved in the worlds of comedy and publishing “made me see that, actually, there are some really good things about medicine. When I see what other people are having to go through with their jobs, the certainty and the progression of the NHS looks great.”

On the cusp of becoming a consultant, presumably braced for a new round of “are you really the consultant?”, he’s determined not to change his bedside or overall manner for the job. “A lot of people, when they become consultants, completely change the way they dress, come in suddenly wearing a brand new suit. I would imagine that’s mainly cardiologists.”