this is bbc news. the headlines: paralysis continues in the us congress with the republican leader in the house kevin mccarthy failing in his 11th attempt to get elected speaker. the session has now been adjourned and voting will continue on friday. a small group of republicans has been derailing attempts to elect him. three mexican security personnel have died in the northwestern state of sinaloa in violence that broke out following the arrest of a leader of an infamous criminal gang. ovidio guzman—lopez is the son of the notorious drug lord dubbed �*el chapo�*, who's serving a life sentence in a us jail. there've been further revelations by prince harry about his life in britain's royal family. his new book isn't due out until next week, but parts of it have already been made public.

it contains a series of claims, including an allegation his brother prince william physically attacked him. now on bbc news, it's hardtalk. welcome to hardtalk. i'm stephen sackur. we humans know that one day we will die. but as long as our end has no specific timetable attached, many of us choose to shelve the thought, avoid it. covid, which took such a grim toll in so many countries, challenged us to confront the reality of our mortality. but still, health care professionals say what they call "death literacy" is lacking. my guest is rachel clarke, a doctor who made a choice to work with the dying, and who's written about it too,

from a personal and professional viewpoint. can death be life affirming? dr rachel clarke, welcome to hardtalk. thank you. now, you have had pretty much two decades of doctoring. how has that time changed the way you do the job? well, i think i was pretty naive when i started, in the sense that i went through medical school that taught me essentially how to fix broken body parts.

so that's the way you learn medicine. a sort of mechanical approach to medicine? yes. so, liver — how does a liver work? how does it break down? how do you fix it? then you'll move on to heart, lungs, brain. so you end up acquiring this kind of piecemeal, jigsaw approach to fixing broken bodies. and, strangely, given that most people want to become doctors because they care about people and they want to help them, patients as human beings are very often just sort of shoved to the periphery somewhat, and you're never taught overtly how to heal, how to imagine yourself in an empathetic relationship with patients, whereby just the act of talking with them itself can be therapeutic. so i think i came out of that very much of the mind—set that that was myjob,

and if i couldn't fix the broken body parts, then i was failing as a doctor. and that meant i was almost set up to fail. so, in a sense — i mean, this is blunt — but were you trained to park your feelings, maybe your empathy, at the door as you enter the surgery, the clinic, the hospital, whatever? yes, very much so. so, my first year, i dissected one single human body, sort of in increments, twice a week throughout a year. and that's a perfect example of what you're taught. so i was older than most medical students. they were all 18, fresh out of school. i was a decade older. but still, you're confronted with one of the ultimate taboos that human beings have — a dead body — and you violate it. you pick up a scalpel — and i was the first person in my group who violated this dead human being. but nobody talked about it,

everybody acted cool. they pretended it didn't matter. and that continues all the way through with senior doctors who appear to be completely cold and detached from the various violations that being a doctor involves. and just to continue the thought, then, if you were trained that medicine was a form of sort of high—grade biological mechanics, i guess the corollary of that is that if the body is failing beyond repair, if it's terminally ill, dying, and death is approaching, that is failure. exactly. the machine is broken and there's nothing more to be done. yes. yes, exactly. and in exactly the same way as a mechanic will kind of wring the oily rag out in the garage and says, you know, "sorry, guv, nothing more to do here, "send it to the scrapheap." so it is with a human being, if that's your approach. see, there's one extraordinary quote,

and you use it in your very passionate and powerful memoir of your involvement with dying and with death, but it's a story you tell about a doctor, a specialist who, having seen that a patient he was treating for cancer was beyond help, he said — "there is nothing more for us to do here. "send her to the palliative dustbin." mm. is that a prevalent feeling in the medical profession? er...it is not as bad as it used to be. so that was 20 years ago. i vividly remember it. i was disgusted, but too timid to stand up and say, "how can you possibly speak about a patient like that?" to my shame. it's less prevalent, and there is more awareness now that doctors have to be human beings. we are not doing a good job if we're not empathising with our patients.

so things are getting better, but it's slow and it's... there are still attitudes like that. there are still doctors who dismiss patients once they have a terminal diagnosis. and i want to talk much more about how palliative care can and should work. but actually, at this point, i want to rewind a little bit, because everything you've told me so far suggests that you were a person who wanted to be a doctor because you cared enormously about helping people in their lives, particularly at their most vulnerable time when they have real health problems. i know "care" is a word that doctors are very careful about — showing emotion, engagement and all of that — but i'm just surprised in a way that you, after training, you wanted to be a doctor still because you'd left your previous profession, journalism, precisely because it didn't have enough meaning for you. and then you're being told by doctors, be very careful about investing too much in this health care profession. well, i thought

that was complete nonsense. and it is what you're taught. so, perhaps unintentionally, a lot of senior doctors will encourage young doctors in training to make themselves sort of hard as nails through their example of apparent insouciance as they move through this world of sort of broken, sometimes dying human beings. but i felt, perhaps with the benefit of a decade ofjournalism behind me, that i wasn't going to accept that, i was sceptical of that and i challenged that. and i can remember, even as a medical student, sometimes if a senior consultant plans to behave in a way that actually was going to distress a patient, i would stand up to them and say, "no." and i think i believed, i could see that although all patients were vulnerable, some were particularly vulnerable,

and patients who were dying almost literally sometimes didn't have a voice. they were too frail physically to be able to speak, to ask for help. and i naturally gravitated towards those very vulnerable patients. and far from feeling as though there wasn't anything i could do in this environment, i felt the opposite — i felt i want to advocate, i want to use my skills for these particular patients, because it's not right that certain patients are kind of cast onto the scrapheap. you took a choice that most doctors do not make. you took a choice not to turn away from death, but to actually turn toward death and to focus yourself, give yourself to palliative care, the people in the last days of their life. yes. why did you do that? well, certainly not for the glamour or prestige! so in medicine, there's a great hierarchy, and you have your brain surgeons and your heart surgeons

at the top. and palliative care doctors are definitely one of those specialities that are low status. we're not rock stars. we're the support act that no—one wants to be and no—one wants our autograph. but i...i believed that... ..what i observed as a young doctor was that dying, in a way, is a more extreme version of what we all go through in our lives. we go through losses of one kind or another — of our health, of the people we love, of our resilience, our youth — and, ultimately, that ends up with the final loss. we are mortal creatures, we will die. and we can and do, of course, live our lives in denial of that. we might drive ourselves mad if we thought about it every day, but nevertheless, it's coming to us all. and what i noticed as a doctor was those patients who were very close to the end of life,

not only were they being badly served very often by the medical profession, but they were also human beings who were showing such astonishing courage, resilience, strength, determination to carry on living however little time remained of their life. and so i actually found it the opposite of depressing. i found it incredibly uplifting, because there is something about death's proximity, that sort of shadow leaning over your shoulder, that concentrates the mind. it forces you to think, "what do i really care about? "my time is limited, it's coming to an end." and that's when i think people rise so often to their best selves, and i get to see that. and would it be true to say that the focus of your care, then, is perhaps less on the mechanics of medicine? because, by definition, people in hospices where you work, they are — they know, and their doctors know,

that they are going to die fairly imminently, so the focus is less on the sort of mechanics of fixing, and it's more on, in a sense, what's happening in their minds. and are you, in a sense, as much sort of psychiatrist as medical doctor? to some extent. the medicine of palliative care, the kind of hard medicine, is really interesting, precisely because palliative care patients often have a lot of things going wrong with their bodies simultaneously. so if your liver, your heart and your kidneys are all failing, working out which drugs you can safely give, which ones will make improvements rather than make things worse is really challenging. so it's a very intricate... i mean, on that level, it's fine calculations about pain relief as much as anything. yes. but the really important question, and the one that i always ask every patient

when i meet them for the first time — and it's a question that's sadly missing from a great many medical encounters — it's this, it's, "tell me what really matters to you as a patient, "because myjob as your doctor is to help you live "however long remains of your life "as richly and as fully as you possibly can, "but on your terms — "not mine, not anyone else�*s — your terms." and that question, i think, should be at the heart of every single medical encounter, but it often isn't — it's often kind of pushed to the edges by the medical machine. do you encourage people to take whatever medical options there are to prolong their lives? i mean, i'mjust thinking of cancer care, where there are experimental drugs offered — they can be very punishing to the body, but they might extend your life by three weeks or three months, or possibly a year. is it automatic to you

as a doctor that you would encourage the patient to go down that track? no, and it never should be automatic for any doctor. ourjob is to ensure to the best of our abilities that we inform a patient. so we give them the information about all of the risks and benefits of a treatment — for example, a cancer drug, more chemotherapy. and that's the most important thing to do that in a sensitive and clear way, and then discuss with the patient how that information marries with what matters to them. so, for example, i recently cared for a young patient, a young woman with young children. she has to get to christmas. she has to be there so that her little children — and they're pre—school children — will have one more christmas with mummy, and she knows it's going to be her last. and that changes everything because we have to try and help that. whereas, if you have had sort

of three years on and off of chemotherapy, every few months of it have made you feel rotten, you've been in hospital for a lot of it, you may well reach the point where you think, "i've got a choice. "i may get a few more months of life "if i have more of this." or i could just say, "you know what? "let's just ditch all of the hospitals, the tests, "the scans, the rotten drugs that make me feel sick. "i'm just going to live my life now and i'm going to go "on holiday to ibiza." which, again, is something that recently someone decided. all but you have to empower your patients to make those decisions for themselves. and too often doctors will fail in both directions. they may push somebody towards treatment without really exploring whether or not it's right for them, or they may write them off.

and sometimes a patient may come to hospital and their doctor may think, "they're 75, they've got terminal cancer, there's not "much more we can do here." and, again, you just can't do that. you've got to talk to the patient. your memoir of all of this is woven with extraordinarily moving stories, and it's clear that there is one heck of a burden on a doctor doing the work that you do. does it grind you down? are there times when, actually, you can't take the pain you see amongst both patients and theirfamilies, the horrible decisions that they have to take and that you have to take with them? does it get too much? it's a strange thing because i always at work want to be working in the most difficult situations, where somebody has incredible amounts of distress or pain, or young children, or something that makes it really traumatic. and that's not out of masochism. it's because that's

when you metaphorically really roll your sleeves up and you're operating at the absolute edge of your abilities — both in terms of prescribing and the medicine of it, and also the conversations you're having to have. so that's when it's most fulfilling, in a strange way. but, of course, it does take a toll. and when it really hit me hard was during the pandemic. i was on covid wards where, every day, i would be seeing patients dying in the same way of the same disease over and over again. and in the first wave in particular, we had no treatments. all we had was oxygen, nothing else. and to see patients dying with that speed and with that repetitiveness was soul—destroying. and i think i use that in a very precise sense. i felt as though my soul was being corroded away

at points in the pandemic. but i got to do something — i got to try and help. and i know i have lots of friends who desperately wanted to do something and couldn't bear the fact that they were sitting at home on furlough, not able to do anything. one of the hardest things it seems that you ever had to do is treat your father. i mean, you weren't his direct oncologist, but you dealt with your father's cancer. so you were a very loving daughter, but you were also a doctor who was analysing your own father as a patient. and, as it happens, he was a veteran gp himself. you write about it in a way that suggests to me that you were surprised that it actually hit you in the way that it did. despite all of the years you'd had in palliative care, this was something very different for you. yes. dad was diagnosed with terminal cancer from the outset. it had already spread.

and he was my classical sort of hero father figure, on a pedestal. i had worshipped him for as long as i can remember, since being a tiny little girl. and he was my rock. and if i ever had a problem in my life, he was the person, not only that i would call, but he would fix it. he would know what to say to fix it. and ifound it unbelievably difficult to see this man, who was such a colossus for me, steadily, relentlessly being stripped away by this horrible disease, both physically and mentally. he, towards the end, became frightened, became angry, went through periods of almost bitterness as he gradually adjusted to his diagnosis. i mean, that's interesting because what i think is important to say from what you write about death is that no amount of morphine is going to get rid

of the pain. there is pain in death... yes. ..and it's notjust physical pain. it's the grief, it's the sense of loss. and that is beyond drugs, and people have to confront it. exactly. yes. and i think we often hear these days of the concept of a good death, as though somehow, if you do death right, it's not going to hurt at all. do you ever use that phrase with your patients? "a good death." no, no. no, never. no. because of precisely what you've just alluded to. i think there is an inescapable, momentous horror to dying, in a way, for all of us. every single thing that we love in the world, every one that we love in the world is going to slip through our fingers one way or another when either we die or they die. and that's. .. you can't palliate or sugar—coat that. that's the price of being a human being. that's necessary suffering that goes with being human. but the other stuff —

the symptoms around dying — we've got great drugs, great meds. so how is it, then, that for you, as a doctor, so committed to this day—on—day addressing of the most difficult situations for patients and their families in hospices — how is it that you, in recent years, have also managed to convey so much political activism — and i'll be honest with you — so much rage about what you see happening to the national health service in england and wales ? i mean, is there room for that in your professional life? well, in a sense, no. i'm always far too busy and kind of working too hard and juggling too many things. however, for me, being an activist and fighting and campaigning for the british national health service is absolutely just part and parcel of what i do as a doctor.

but by which i mean... ..patients are some of society's most vulnerable members. if you have a diagnosis of terminal cancer, you have got a tough time ahead. and we are meant to have a cradle—to—grave health service in this country funded by taxpayers, so that everybody in need receives high—quality health care. that's a defining principle of the country. interestingly, palliative care isn't entirely funded by the nhs. indeed, probably only a third of it is funded by government. absolutely. the rest of it is funded by charity, which i guess tells you something about the priorities put on palliative care. exactly. but more generally, i believe that every government — i don't care what political party they are — every government should honour those founding principles of the nhs and should be honest about what the nhs is achieving orfailing to achieve, and what is needed in terms of funding and resources.

can you go too far? just a couple... a quote from you on twitter, i think we took it from. "everything is falling apart in the nhs in "the most catastrophic way. "how, in a rich, civilised country can patients be dying "on a trolley in a corridor or in a lift?" i mean, in a sense, is it helpful to the patients you are seeing on a daily basis to signal to them that you think the system of which they are now a part is totally failing? mm. that is happening right now in every hospital up and down the country. there are patients dying in corridors, in ambulances. they can't even get inside the hospital because the hospital is full. my hospital is on black alert today and so the patients are being diverted away to other hospitals because we're completely full. you say you're not political,

but this is political. it's political in the sense that wanting a functioning health service is political. i think it's important to draw a distinction between party political activism and campaigning for a principle you believe in. and i believe deeply in the principle of good—quality, universal health care. and so i believe i have a duty to be candid about that, because if we pretend it's not happening, it doesn't make it go away, itjust increases the chances of it never being fixed. final question — a significant number of doctors are leaving the medical profession early, many of them saying they no longer believe that the system is fit for purpose and they can't be a part of it. they feel — as you used the phrase earlier on — burnt out by it. could there become a point where medicine no longerfeels right for you? never, ever, ever. i will fight for my patients and for this beautiful nhs.

the principles of the nhs are just about the most wonderful thing we have in this country. i will fight for them for as long as i'm possibly able to. and i... i can't imagine living now not being a doctor. i love it to bits. dr rachel clarke, it's been a pleasure having you on hardtalk. thank you very much. thank you. hello there. the weather's going to calm down a bit on friday, but we've got more wet and windy weather to come this weekend. another area of low pressure, weather fronts to eventually push in from the west.

this weather front has brought some heavy rain and gusty winds. that area of low pressure is where we've got the strongest of the winds in scotland. even first thing in the morning, it's very windy through the central belt of scotland, but the strongest winds will be in northern parts of the country, gusting 60 or 70 miles an hour. and we've also got a lot of showers coming into scotland. that band of rain sweeping away from england and wales will be followed by clear skies and temperatures early in the morning, 6—7 degrees. lots of showers, though, to begin with in scotland, very windy start, but the winds do moderate. the showers become fewer and we'll see some sunshine. other parts of the uk seeing some sunshine, especially in the morning, but tending to cloud over a bit more in western areas in the afternoon. a little bit of rain coming into the south—west of england and south wales as well. a breezy day, a mild day, temperatures 9—12 degrees on friday afternoon. but there is this band of rain here coming into western areas during the evening. itjust gets wetter and maybe windier again during the evening. and that band of rain pushes its way eastwards overnight. strong southerly winds are likely. it's going to be a very mild night, of course, with that cloud and rain.

temperatures in southern parts of the uk, perhaps no lower than 11 degrees. but we start the weekend with some rain. it's going to be a very unsettled weekend. quite windy as well. blustery winds to come, bringing some rain or some showers as well. and we've got that rain to start with, then, across much of scotland, england and wales. it's going to shuffle its way eastwards, it's going to hang around into the morning, perhaps into the afternoon across east anglia and the south—east. following that, the winds pick up again around these western coasts. we're going to find lots of showers feeding in. some of those will be heavy. some sunshine in between the showers and temperatures still on the mild side, 8—11 degrees. second half of the weekend, we're dominated, really, by this low pressure. it's going to hang around for a while. it's approaching the north—west of scotland. it will be very windy here saturday night into sunday morning, and around that area of low pressure, we've got these strong and blustery winds. that's going to feed in some sunshine, but we're also going to find quite a few showers. some of those could be heavy and thundery and it's just about cold enough for a little bit of snow over the tops of the mountains in scotland. temperatures will be a shade lower on sunday,

around 7—9 celsius.

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of an infamous drugs gang. a speaker