Dr Rachel Clarke, Specialty doctor in palliative medicine and author
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Rachel is a specialty doctor in palliative medicine and the author of four Sunday Times bestselling non-fiction books about medicine. The most recent of these, The Story of a Heart (2024), tells the tale of the transplant that made legal history through the introduction of ‘Max and Keira’s Law’ in 2018. Breathtaking (2021), was adapted into a major television series, broadcast on ITV in 2024 and depicts how she and her colleagues confronted the height of the Covid-19 pandemic. Dear Life (2020), about working in an NHS hospice, was shortlisted for the 2020 Costa Biography Award, long-listed for the 2020 Baillie Gifford Prize and chosen as a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week. Your Life in My Hands (2017) documents life as a junior doctor.
Before going to medical school, Rachel was a television journalist. She continues to write regularly for the Guardian, Sunday Times, New Statesman and Lancet among others, and appears regularly on television and radio.
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Prof Nicholas Levy, Consultant Anaesthetist and
Peri-operative medicine
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Nicholas graduated from the Royal Free Hospital in 1993 and undertook anaesthetic training in the Central London School of Anaesthesia. In 2003, he was appointed as a Consultant Anaesthetist at the West Suffolk Hospital, and in 2022 he was appointed as Associate Medical Director.
Nicholas has been instrumental in transforming the perioperative management of patients with diabetes over the past 15 years. His concepts on reduced reliance on intravenous insulin and increase reliance on modification of normal medication have increasingly been adopted. He has co-authored all the UK guidance on perioperative management of diabetes and is the lead anaesthetist for the CPOC diabetes workstream.
Furthermore, whilst working in pre-operative assessment, he saw that patients were still taking and being prescribed their opioids from previous surgery. He then realized that anaesthetists have a role in promoting deprescribing of perioperative drugs, and that surgery and modified-release opioids are significant risk factors for opioid misuse in the UK. Subsequently, he has been involved in co-authoring much of the UK guidance on the perioperative management of opioids and pain.
In his spare time, he is scuba diving instructor. He also swims in the local Lido throughout the year, except when ice prevents entry. In between that he participates in local half marathons at a sedate pace.
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Mr Chris Lemons, Saturation Diver
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Chris has been a commercial diver, and now IMCA Diving Supervisor for over 18 years, and currently specialises in deep sea saturation diving, operating almost exclusively in the oil and gas industry.
This highly specialised form of diving involves living in the claustrophobic confines of a decompression chamber for up to 28 days at a time, commuting daily to the sea-bed in a diving bell, and working at depths of up to 900 feet for 6 hours at a time.
In September of 2012, a freak failure of the dynamic positioning system of the vessel he was working under, resulted in the umbilical which provides him with breathing gas, light and heat being severed completely. He was left on the seabed, in complete darkness 300 feet below the surface, with only the 5 minutes of breathing gas he carried in the emergency tanks on his back, and no way to protect himself from the freezing temperatures.
It took his heroic rescuers over 40 minutes to come back and fetch him, and his miraculous survival story has baffled experts ever since.
His extraordinary story was subsequently immortalised in the hit Netflix/BBC documentary 'Last Breath,' a version of which has been developed into a Hollywood movie starring Woody Harrelson, Simu Liu and Finn Cole and is due for release on the 28th of February 2025.
Chris was born in Edinburgh, raised in Cambridge, and now lives in the South of France with his partner and two daughters.
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