An interesting read following Rachaels career within the NHS but also her personal life.
The book featured more about her personal life than her career as a midwife, I would have liked some more stories about the families she came across in her career.
I felt the families she did talk about were very brief throughout.
I was lucky to get an updated version of the novel through Netgalley which featured the authors note about the Covid pandemic.
Overall it was an easy read but not one I would rush to recommend.
Thank you Netgalley and Mirror Books for the arc.

An interesting foray into health visiting in England. When we had our children this was a strange new provision for me, one born outside the country, the thought of a health visitor coming to our home to see if everything was all right with the children. The author shares enough stories that I kept reading but at times the book felt like a listing of her various jobs/further education pursuits. A book I’m glad I read but because the writing wasn’t as strong as it could have been, not one that I’ll gush about.

This is an excellent account of the life of a Health Visitor. My own children as adults have had very different experiences with Health Visitors to me. I had my children back in the days of the regular check and knowing the support was there. One of my happy memories of being a new young mum was the twice weekly clinics my HV ran where mums took their babies for weighing, checks, just a chat with the HV or to have the company of other mums in the same situation. It was an invaluable service and I just couldn’t understand why my daughter didn’t have this option with her children.

Reading this has been an eye opener into the changes Health Visitors have had to make within their jobs. The service the provide really is amazing and I feel this book more than covered it but there is still so much to tell.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publishers for the ARC in return for an honest and unbiased opinion.

An insight into the life of a Health Visitor – which is far more than cooing over babies whilst drinking tea!

The book is less about the people she meets and more about her personal life & how the role of the Health Visitor has changed over the last 30 years.
Throughout the book, we follow Rachael as she leaves her Romany family upbringing to head for London where she trained as a nurse, then a midwife before turning to Health Visiting. A brief stint in management confirmed that she wanted to remain on the “front line” working with families.

There is a good balance of humour intermixed with heartbreaking moments and tales of hope. It touches on some of the more difficult topics that a Health Visitor will encounter – drugs, poverty, homelessness, mental health issues, abuse and more. We also meet an elderly man living in a freezing caravan and see that a Health Visitors role encompasses people of all ages, not just babies.

The book was an easy read and overall it was an interesting memoir of Rachael’s life but from the “blurb” I was expecting more about her work than her personal life. It is clear that she loves her job & she makes some very good points about how budget constraints & changes to structures will lead to children/families “slipping through the gap”

Disclosure: I received an advance copy of this book free from the publisher via NetGalley. Whilst thanks go to the publisher & author for the opportunity to read it, all opinions are my own.

I was sadly disappointed by this. I thought it features too much about her own life featured within the pages.
I felt she was also disrespectful to some of her previous clients, which doesn't make for interesting/enjoyable reading.

Many thanks to Netgalley and Mirror Books for my copy. I adore medical memoirs and this one didn't disappoint. Rachael Hearson has been a health visitor for over 30 years and some of her anecdotes are truly horrifying. The poverty and terrible living conditions that some poor families experience was very eye opening. It is shocking that people in the UK live like this. What a vital and under stated role health visitors play in family lives. This book will stay with me for a very long time.

Good book giving an insight into the day to day aspects of a health visitors job. Interesting to learn about the range of tasks they are expected to undertake.

Thanks to NetGalley for the chance to read this book prior to release. There are a lot of these medical bio/memoirs books on the market and this is one of the good ones. An easy, flowing book makes you feel as if Rachel is actually just chatting to you. Not all sugar coated you hear of her own personal struggles to keep family life and job running at the same time. I enjoyed it.

I have nothing to do with the medical industry but have always found autobiographies from those in that field fascinating. I read Adam Kay’s book as soon as it came out, David Nott’s war doctor book is next on my shelf, and I read Jed Mercurio’s fictional book Bodies before it was made into a Tv show. Therefore I was very happy to get an advance copy of Rachael’s book ‘Handle with Care’ from NetGalley. I’ve had both midwives and health visitors visit after the birth of my babies, and I was sure I had only witnessed a tiny proportion of what health visitors actually do. And this book certainly opened my eyes via Rachael’s very personable style. She starts at the beginning of her career, as a student nurse, in awe of the sisters and matrons in the London hospital. She shares her personal life along with stories of those in her care. I found the book entertaining, sometimes sad, sometimes heartwarming. It’s a tale of her 40 years in nursing that she conveys as if speaking to you as friends enjoying a long tea break together.

Fantastic. Totally totally loved this book. Read really quick. Really enjoyed this. I was totally involved in this and finished it so so quick amazing

Handle With Care, Confessions of an NHS Health Visitor. Rachael Hearson. 3.5/5 👩🏻‍⚕️

Huge thanks to #NetGalley for my copy of this book in exchange for a review. Rachael Hearson opens up about her years in the NHS, from Nurse to Midwife to Health Visitor.

Rachael exposes the pressure the NHS is buckling under, the difficult situations faced by Health Visitors who feel, often, that are disliked and unwanted by the public. She exposes the glaring flaws in our system and the gaps in our social care.

This book also explored Rachaels personal life, her own deeply personal struggles from childhood to now. A thought provoking read.

I was looking forward to reading this book, hoping it had a vibe of the Adam Kay books. As I started reading I noticed it was more of an autobiographical start and kept reading hoping that it would be more about the health visiting stories as I got through the book. However, rather than being am insight to the world of health visiting it was an autobiography of a woman I've never heard of and certainly wouldn't have read if it was advertised that way on the blurb.

I was really looking forward to reading this book when I first saw it advertised, I was hoping for an insight into family struggles and well being on a day to day basis of a health visitor. What we actually get is the upbringing and daily life of a woman who starts off as a nurse moves into midwifery and then a Health visitor. I felt pages were filled with document like information to fill the pages out. Like the hats document.

The book focuses more on her personal life rather than that of a health visitor, which to be honest was pretty boring. She tried to touch on humour but it didn't really add to the book. So, all in all, it was a waste of time. I was hoping to read more about the cases that she dealt with rather than her daily life on the school run etc.
Thank you, NetGalley for the opportunity.

I enjoyed the story of the life of a Health Visitor. Heartwarming tales about how far she would go to help out families and how things have changed over the years. Having 3 children myself it was nice to see things from the other side

Having read some excellent medical memoirs in the last year, I had such hopes for this book. However I have to admit that it fell flat for me.
This was more an autobiography with little bits of Health Care stories peppered in sparingly. The marketing of this books seems to have put an emphasis on Rachael's work and not her home life, which is not the case when reading.
I struggled to connect with Rachael and found some of the comments about her patients a little unprofessional (calling one 'bat shit crazy' whilst in the confines of her colleagues and family may be one thing, but stating this publicly in a book didn't win me over).
I would have loved to read more about her time in the NHS - it's clear that Rachael has seen a lot of change over her career and I would have loved to have read about them.

I love reading books written by NHS frontline workers and this was no different. The beginning of the book made me wonder if I was going to enjoy it but in the end I loved it. With a young child myself it made me think of my health visitor and nursery nurse and that they had my child’s interest at heart through everything. I cannot thank them all enough.

Handle With Care is a professional memoir of a Health Visitor in the UK. Rachael Hearson weaves together her story of her childhood, personal life and professional encounters in an interesting way. Unfortunately I felt there was a little too much personal life and not enough working life in the mix. I specifically read these types of medical professional memoirs to find out about unusual or stand out cases in their careers and even though there were some it just didn't totally satisfy me. I was really hoping that this book would show just how undervalued and necessary Health Visitors are and demonstrate the hard work they do and whilst it did do this somewhat it would have been great to read more. It would also have been good to read about a broader range of cases and situations that Health Visitors have to deal with as the book focused mainly on parents who were addicts and child neglect.
Overall I thought the book was average and I was quite disappointed as I felt it could have been so much more and helped to explain the profession to the public.

DNF @18%

Ohh I was so excited about this book being an interesting new perspective from health visitors. I was looking forward to tales of what it was like and the things she saw. Instead what I got was pages and pages about her upbringing; almost 20% of the way into the book and there’s no mention of her being a health visitor so far.

I just couldn’t get on with the writing at all and found myself skimming it towards the end hoping it would get more interesting but it just never did. Not one I was interested in finishing and not one I could recommend.

Thank you to NetGalley for giving me the opportunity to read this book, I just wish the synopsis was more accurate about this being more of a biography than a memoir of a health visitor.

I thought this would be a set of medical stories in the vein of Adam Kay or Dr Matt Morgan. It's more of a memoir with some medical stories woven in. I'm afraid I found the prose a bit rambling and it sometimes seemed to jump between stories with no obvious link, so it was a little hard to read.

In 1979 Rachel Hearson started training as a nurse – forty years later she is working as a Health Visitor. This book is her memories of the road she has travelled. Not only does she talk about the day to day realities of her working life, often with telling anecdotes, although she does admit that the extreme can be more memorable. She talks about the processes, the people she deals with (staff and patients – or are they now clients?), the places, the rules and expectations, the changing training, social and legislative requirements and backgrounds. She will cover the changing capacity of medicine to cure and at what cost. Inevitably there will be the issue of resources – or not – and what priorities they are applied to. So this is a very, very busy book covering a broad range of issues.
But nursing is not done by robots; it is done by real people. So there is a very strong overlay of actually living the life as a trainee, nurse, midwife and health visitor. Where she worked, in what hierarchies, what her expectations were and centrally what made her choose nursing as a career in the first place. And in another layer she recounts the moves across her various roles and why. Forty years is a very long time almost a full working lifetime and things have radically changed. Hearson came from a working family with traveller roots, education was limited and money was tight and restricted her choices. For her therefore University was never a real option and nursing (at that stage) provided paid training. Support services for nurses – such as controlled housing – meant that she could move to London and work in places – and with a range of people with different financial backgrounds and life experiences – that would not have been otherwise possible. But for many years money was always tight and London life was particularly difficult as a result.
This theme of trying to grow and support a family on a health worker’s salary – even with a partner – is one that resounds throughout the book. It meant that the more diverse (and professionally complicated) London life reverted to a rural post with the differences that entailed. But it means that wherever she worked she was acutely aware of the additional challenges many of her poorer patients and clients were dealing with – something she makes clear in this book. A substantial chapter on how the ‘90s recession impacted on her family shows that no holds are barred when discussing real life and its impacts. If you need a car to do your job and you have no money to provide one what do you do? If you need money for petrol to go to work and you need to feed your children with the same money which do you chose? Who in the community around you will help and how many will pass by oblivious?
But we need to remember that she worked first directly in the Health Service, then in a medical practice than as a trained nurse close to “protective services”. Over the years these roles changed – and became more “politicised” with ever changing official priorities with staff trying to meet targets set elsewhere. These are real issues because they provide an essential service and safety net for many – some extremely vulnerable – at times of great personal change and stress.
Hearson is trying to recount a huge range of complex inter-relating issues in a coherent and readable way. To be honest there are times when she seemed to struggle with the scale of this. Information or anecdote placement could be challenged and it might be suggested that some personal information could be edited or amalgamated. But behind that this is an important book in what it says about how key services we need for community well being are run. Not the “official version”, but the one from on the ground by a key worker of extensive experience who has quietly provided life saving services to many.