Rachel Hearson has a lovely relaxed writing style and her depiction of her childhood was lovely. Usually in a memoir based on a specific career or time of life then I prefer the story to begin at that point but in this case I was very grateful that Hearson took us back to her early life. I am a generation behind the author’s so it was interesting to see the 80’s through the eyes of someone who lived it as an adult. If only it were so easy to get a degree now!!
Rachel is clearly very proud of her profession and done as described in her book, I’d agree that Health Visitors are amazing people! Sadly, my own personal experience with of being bullied by our village’s HV when I was a single parent and then to have her not notice/ignore my post natal depression means I’ve never experienced anything even remotely close to what Hearson describes. Sadly no one I ever knew or met had a good word to say about the woman including the GP!! I’m sure Rachel is an incredibly dedicated and loving HV, she radiates kindness and a firm, fair positivity but I do think she needs to acknowledge that many of her professional colleagues aren’t like her. A trip to any parenting forum will bear this out, with HVs giving out old fashioned and now superseded advice regarding cosleeping, the use of punishment with preschoolers, weaning and more. I was very lucky to have my 4th child in a different town and not have to deal with Cruella D’visitor. This time I didn’t receive a baby visit which was fine by me and at 10 months received a phone call to ask me how things were and if I wanted a visit. My cheery “No thanks!” Was met with an equally cheery “well I’m fairly sure you know what you’re doing by now!” When my daughter was under 6 months we were invited to stay behind after baby group and listen to the HV give a weaning talk. The woman said that babies should be weaned from the breast or wouldn’t eat well and that “in my day weaning age was 16 weeks and now it’s 24, it never did my kids any harm and you’ll know if your baby is hungry” no word on the 4 month sleep regression that many parents mistake for hunger or the virgin gut evidence that underpins the need for nothing but milk for 6 months.
At age 2 I received letter after letter inviting me to some group observation thing. The letter said were I not interested then to ignore the letter. Which I did. So they sent another. And another. And yes.. another.
It has always been my view that the service was a waste of NHS money as most people can access what a HV provides via other routes, the GP, breastfeeding clinics etc and that it was more of a social care concern. So I’m sad to hear from the author that someone in government had the same idea as me and made a total hash of it and didn’t ring fence the budget for it!! She made very good points about the lack of integration within the GPs surgery and the council way of working with hot dealing, working away from the office etc not being helpful in the health visitor role. Perhaps then they do need to be under the NHS again then but with the resources firmly targeted at those women who Rachel describes being so important to. Those in hostels, those under social care, in poor housing etc and there must be much more commitment to ongoing training and keeping abreast of changes to recommendations and why those recommendations were made especially when they are from the WHO. There is no need for them to be qualified nurses and midwives if they tell mothers that baby led weaning will ‘starve’ their child and cause them to be dependent on the breast (like that’s a bad thing)
Despite my prejudices and personal opinions I enjoyed reading this book and finished it in a day.

This is the story of a health visitor’s career, spanning over four decades.
As an ex-social worker, a bit younger than the author, this account took me back to the ‘good old days’ when we had time to form genuine relationships with clients and do real good.
The book ends in the present day - funding cut and visits reduced, if happening at all. The health visitor too is the victim of bureaucracy and crisis-management.
But there is a ray of hope even as Hearson ends in the middle of the coronavirus crisis: will we learn to appreciate NHS colleagues and the service they provide? Could it be the start of appreciation being followed by pay rises?
Hearson writes with humour and tracing her career from nurse to midwife to health visitor is fascinating. She’s also honest about her own life and when she falls on hard times, which really adds to her account.
I thoroughly enjoyed it and it brought back a few memories of my own social work career: recommended.

A remarkable testament to the health visitor, from a vastly experienced and highly qualified member of that profession. Nothing, it seems is beyond their official remit. Alongside the day to day routine visits are the dramas, crises, tragedies. And the health visitor is there in the front line. Theirs is a complex multi- functional role: nurse, carer, social worker, counsellor, surrogate mother/big sister/auntie, for everyone who has a new born for two years. And later,those functioning or barely functioning in the most complex circumstances.
Rachael Hearson’s dedication, determination not to allow an under-funded system to destroy her professionalism, her empathy and understanding of the most needy and vulnerable is both impressive and deeply moving. She has seen it all.
An epilogue updates her experiences to take in the impact too of Coronavirus.
All we can do is be thankful there are professionals like her in every community, tirelessly driven to support and protect.

Thank you @NetGalley and @MirrorBooks for my free pre-release download.

A really interesting book looking into a nurse/healthcare story.
Good insight into the NHS and things we don’t see.
An enjoyable read

A really interesting book giving a completely different insight into the NHS and different sectors of the service. The harsh realist of frontline work and how it has changed is mnd blowing.

As a qualified nurse working at an advanced level and around the same age as the author I was intrigued to read this memoir..I had very brief experiences of working with health visitors during my training and the experience was a bit curate's egg. After qualifying and leaving hospital to work in GP practice we had an amazing HV who was attached to the surgery which meant we were able to contact her very easily and developed a great relationship.
To the book-the over-arching narrative is interesting and I definitely connected with some of her life story. Not as much as I did with Adam Kay's This Is Going To Hurt which I thought relayed a lot of my own life and I really gelled with the book. This book confirms my suspicions that HVs do not need to be nurses (midwives no longer have to do their RGN first so....) I also take issue with her statement that HVs are the only nurses to prioritise health promotion-we spend a lot of time in GP practice doing the very same thing. We also see patients in a variety of settings as lone workers
The book does need a good sort out in terms of flow, lay out, chapter organisation and chronology. It felt a bit all over the place. Yes the spellings/grammar etc will be sorted before publication but this does need more work on the narrative. The Covid-19 epilogue was a bit "off the cuff", felt rushed and an after thought- ,and I'm not a "BoJo" lover, nor are a lot of my colleagues in the NHS. A bit of editing and reworking and I'm sure many people will be interested in reading it

A work of memoir from Rachael Hearson, "Handle With Care" gives the reader a real sense of what it's like to be a health visitor across three decades, and how frontline healthcare services have evolved. I found it to be an easy read, in turns funny and compassionate. The section concerning Edward De Bono's thinking hat theory was particularly interesting.

I really wanted to love this book because it is about someones life. But I found it focused too much on personal things and the NHS funding. I am sure if I had stuck to it the book would have moved along faster.

Really enjoyed this book which clearly underlined the value of our BHS and its associated services. I think the work of a health visitor can sometimes be overlooked but this book shows just how much work they do and how it is needed now more than ever. The stories referred to are all real cases and help you realise how lucky you are not find yourself in similar situations often through no fault of your own. Highly recommend this book.

In with the recent crop of medical training and life in and on the wards. Saying that the area is a new one as life growing up, schooling, exam disappointment and finding a career. Not just a career but the progression from nursing student to midwife and then to health visitor. An in depth look at the training, support and financial costs, then and now..
An excellent well written and informative book putting well deserved light that is often forgotten about in the medical world as we only encounter it when a new baby arrives.
I would definitely recommend this book for both male and female friends.

I requested, and received, an ARC from Netgalley as I had read other books focusing on stories from front line workers. I expected this to be along the same lines with stories and funny anecdotes. However I was partly wrong.

Although some history is good, at first I thought Rachael was giving too much back story. The more I read I realised this made her the professional she is. It made her be able to sympathise but also empathise with her clients. There’s nothing more sobering, yet helpful than being able to relate to the people you’re dealing with (I too frontline work). There’s nothing more rewarding than feeling you’ve truly helped someone and this made me warm to Rachael all the more.

Thank you Netgalley. Highly recommended.

I’ve previously enjoyed and found fascinating other ‘medical memoirs’ - this was interesting, but I would have really enjoyed more focus on the experience within the role, and more real life stories (the few that came up were very brief).
Nonetheless - it’s clearly another essential but underinvested area that would be a catastrophe to lose.

This is a well-written interesting book which held my interest throughout. It follows the NHS career and personal life of the author as a nurse/ health visitor. Having read other medical memoir type books this one is thought-provoking, eye-opening and written by someone who clearly loved their job, not something that everyone can say!

A warts and all telling of life and ups and downs of a health visitor and the characters and situations that her job throws at her. Her tale starts at the very beginning growing up and going into nurse training, told honestly like you’re chatting with a friend over a drink giving you her life story. Fascinating insight. Would recommend.
ARC copy

Health visitor. An easy job, right? Sitting on people's sofas drinking tea and cooing over babies? Not exactly...

Rachael Hearson's memoir is an earnest advocate for public health services and a look at what it's actually like to be a health visitor in England today. She also discusses how the job has changed since she started out, forty years ago. This was very interesting, as I have met health visitors a few times (in England they visit you before and after you have babies) and it was good to know more about them. Rachael has plenty of stories to share, some funny, some crazy and others very sad.

Despite the title and cover, this book is not just about a health visitor's confessions. Rachael spends the first few chapters on her family history, her youth and her training as a nurse and then midwife, before describing her career as a health visitor. Her financial situation is also a significant element of the book. It's brave of her to share this, as she is challenging our assumptions that anyone who works full time and for the NHS must be well-off. She also feels it's important to empathise with her clients, many of whom are living in poverty and for whom she is the link to other organisations who can help, such as food banks, social services, charities and benefits offices.

I felt that the writing style of the book was too straight-forward for my taste and that the dramatic situations could have been described with more flair. As far as medical memoirs go, I have read better ones. However, there are some excellent messages in this book and the content is a real eye-opener. There's an epilogue (hastily written, I think) about coronavirus, which although heartfelt, could have been left out. By the time I read it in early May, it was already a little out of date. Of course it may have been edited before publication, so I wouldn't have been reading the newest version of the book.

In summary, this is a good read if you want to learn more about what NHS health visitors do and if you like reading memoirs. By way of a content warning, there are cases of child abuse mentioned and also some references to miscarriage and terminations.

Thank you to Mirror Books for the advance copy via NetGalley. Handle with Care will be published on 11th June.

NB. This review will be published on my blog on June 3rd.

I was gripped from the start with this book, I loved going through the journey of Rachel’s career and elements of her personal life. She is so warm and kind, the book demonstrates how much she really cares for the people she sees and how she wants the best for them.

I don’t have any children at the moment so have never had personal experience with a health visitor, in fact before this book I could only give you a rough idea of what I thought they did. I didn’t even know they were nurses! I thought they were professionals but didn’t know they were nurses.

Rachel and others like her are the backbones of our NHS, it is times like these we realise how important our NHS is. Racheal entered the NHS over 40 years ago as a student nurse, before continuing and becoming a health visitor. She cared for her family and all the people she was assigned to visit. We go with her to a number of households and situations discovering some people are doing well, others struggling but will get there with a helping hand and others who aren’t suitable parents no matter how many people try to help.

I loved this book, it isn’t the same as an Adam Kay book but it never claimed to be. This is Rachel Hearson’s experience, no one else’s. The book does have more of a focus on Rachel and her life and career rather than a tell-all on her patients which I enjoyed.

I was really interested in this book having read the summary and wanted to love it, as I have many of the other "confessions of a..." type books.
Unfortunately this one I found fell short of the mark, I was interested to read all about the families involved, thinking it would be a bit like call the midwife, but found there to be little in the way of this information and far far more of her own life story.
I also found it was repetitive in parts and the tone was often belittling about others and constantly singing her own praises.
Interesting in parts, but not what I expected from the summary.
My thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for the advance copy in return for my honest review.

‘Handle With Care’ is yet another medical memoir but this time from the perspective of an NHS health visitor. I found this view very unique as most medical memoirs lately are from doctors or clinicians working in hospitals. Health visitors have the interesting experience of visiting patients in their homes multiple times over the course of months and years.

I really enjoyed reading the parts of this book which featured babies and new mothers. It’s a great book which sheds light on poverty and how difficult mothers have it, especially during the first few months of their child’s lives. It made me realise how much more the NHS should be funding health visitors as the author mentions how drastically the services have had to adapt over the decades and how much more support they should be getting.

The downside to this book for me was how much personal history of the author was included. I’m all for knowing about the author’s life but I feel that it would’ve been nicer to have snippets throughout rather than large chunks. It was about 60% personal history and 40% health visiting and I feel like I would’ve enjoyed the book even more if there were more sections about actually going out to visit patients.

It was an overall good book and I would definitely recommend it to people interested in nursing, midwifery or health visiting. However, if you’re thinking about picking this up because you enjoyed books like ‘This Is Going To Hurt’ and ‘Can You Hear Me?’ then just be aware that this book is not set out in a similar way.

I so wanted to enjoy this as I have read a few key worker memoirs lately and I am a family worker and work closely with health visitors so felt I would be able to relate. Unfortunately this was not the case - I felt there was a lot of her own personal experience, which thought interesting took up too much of the story. I would have preferred more specific stories to go deeper and in more detail. The writing also didn’t flow and felt quite disjointed with the brief sentences at time which I didn’t enjoy. Thanks to Netgalley, the author and Mirror Books for an advanced copy in exchange for an honest review.

In this book we see how a health visitor lives and the journey to the job that ensued from training, moving, furthering education and falling into hard times and learning who true friends are while dealing with the demanding task of caring for babies and children living in the community from the happy to the threatened, uncared for in squalor in shows the huge social divide in society and how health workers put their lives on the line to help out new and experienced mother's trying to cope.



It was a very open and honest book and gave a full perspective on what various things health visitors have to go through and see in all the situations they face it was frank, open and very honest and shows what dedication they have to the job, especially in Rachael's case.



Many thanks to the publishers for allowing me to review this book for them!