Jim Down – Life in the Balance

A Doctor’s Stories of Intensive Care

Dr Jim Down brings us to the very heart of the intensive care unit – the section of the hospital where the sickest patients are brought to be cared for until their condition improves. With honesty, humility and a streak of dark humour, Dr Down describes the quietly heroic work of doctors and nurses on the ICU, a place which sits at the cutting edge of medical technology and where a split-second decision can make the difference between life and death.

From headline-grabbing cases like that of Alexander Litvinenko, poisoned by Russian agents and admitted to Down’s ward, to the appalling aftermath of a train crash, and the mundane daily struggle to simply find enough beds, Jim Down provides a unique insight into life on The Unit, and the critical medicine doctors and nurses perform there.

Life in the Balance offers the first real glimpse of intensive care medicine, its immense challenges, deleterious effects on doctors’ mental health and enormous rewards. Its profundity will make you reconsider the fragility of life and reframe your understanding of what it means to care.

Dr Jim Down is a consultant in critical care and anaesthesia at University College London Hospitals. He chairs the ICU consultants’ group, the department of anaesthesia weekly scientific meetings, and the UCLH Trust guideline committee. During the Covid-19 pandemic he worked on UCLH’s busy ICU ward, and was interviewed by the BBC for a groundbreaking report depicting medics on the frontline. His account of that period, Life Support, was published in 2021.

Dr Jim Down will be in conversation with Dr Helen Thomas

Tickets £12.00/£6.00 (students)