I love a juicy and blunt medical memoir, and Ivor Popovich’s A Dim Prognosis delivers just that and more. Akin to the dark humour and stark reality of Adam Kay’s This is Going to Hurt, A Dim Prognosis delivers sharp and cutting remarks that will tell you just how underresourced and underfunded our public healthcare is and the impact it has on good doctors, nurses, and medical staff.

A gripping exposé of New Zealand’s failing health system. This compelling tell-all reveals the realities of working as a doctor in New Zealand. Fast-paced and darkly funny, it chronicles ten years of working in medicine – treating the victims of the Whakaari White Island eruption, being on the frontline during the pandemic, dealing with chronic understaffing -and sheds a light on where and why the health system is collapsing. Covering everything from a bullying and toxic culture to the alarming disparities between the public and private health sectors and years of mismanaged priorities, this is a clear-eyed account of a health system on life support.

Some of you may recall I talked about this topic and situation in Ineke Meredith’s On Call, another great New Zealand medical memoir, and I feel the emotions come roaring back with this hard-hitting novel. It isn’t just the fact that this discussion is one that has such clear answers, and yet the lack of action to provide what is so desperately needed is going to drive our healthcare system to its own funeral, but it is also the fact that these personal memoirs keep coming out. I love hearing from the voices who are directly affected by the lack of movement to fix these issues because they are the ones with the fury and raw emotion to make the stories land. What makes me so sad is that these stories have to continue to come out for some discussion to be had on a more public level.

Ivor Popovich calls out so many issues without the system, from the toxic work culture and abuses of power witnessed daily, to the endless hoops people are made to jump through just to get a consult, and that’s not even touching the unknown months it takes to get a specialist for whatever a patient needs. Reading A Dim Prognosis had me so passionately angry at various people within and outside of the system for letting it get to this state, and I side with these healthcare workers so strongly. It is books like this that make you feel so deeply for the plights of these workers, for the long, harsh hours they work day in and day out with no change in sight. I don’t want to thank him for going through all of this because that feels so impersonal and naive, but Ivor Popovich deserves so much respect and praise for getting his experiences on paper and producing this incredible memoir.

I don’t think I will ever tire of reading medical memoirs as a reader, but as a human being, I am tired of reading the same stories and seeing no action being taken by those in power who should be making the changes possible to provide the right amount of resources and medical staff for these hospitals. I know this isn’t exclusive to Aotearoa New Zealand, which is why I feel so many would not only relate to this but also learn so much from the experiences of the doctors who have to work through it day by day. A Dim Prognosis is an exceptional book, and I highly recommend it to all.