A story about 23 cans of butter beans.

When I decided to pause my psychiatry training to set up EveryDoctor, I didn’t initially have a team. I didn’t have an income. And the only way we could afford to do it was to first move our family of 4 into a 1 bed flat in London, then...

Save up and renovate a small cottage in rural Ireland. We could afford childcare for our 1+2.5 year old there. We knew no one. And I flew back and forth to London as I tried to build relationships with journalists. I was sent threats by senior establishment figures in...

Medicine. I was warned I’d be struck off. I was trolled to an unbelievable extent. And I had no income. Rumours started that I was starting a ‘cult’. I was told I was looking to ‘profiteer like Richard Branson’. It was really, really hairy trying to convince anyone I wasn’t...

Corrupt. Meanwhile, I’d passed all my exams in psychiatry (and needed to do another 3 years training to become a consultant), but put my career on hold to focus on building EveryDoctor. I had no earnings. I put myself, personally, £50k into debt. At one point, I mistakenly...

Ordered 23 cans of butter beans. And I had to eat those butter beans in inventive ways, because I was going further and further into debt. And why did I stick at it? Why did my team come on-board? Why did we put up with the trolling and the debt and the judgement? Because...

medicine is broken. Doctors aren’t broken, but the system is broken. The system is becoming privatised. The system is woefully underfunded. The system lays the blame of errors at the feet of healthcare professionals when in reality there’s water leaking through the roof of...

some hospitals. There’s IT equipment which doesn’t work. There’s never enough time for a break in a 13 hour shift and that’s not normal, but it’s the norm. It’s bad for everyone. It’s bad for doctors and it’s terrible for patients. And something had to give. Many healthcare...

leaders profit from the bad decisions happening. Or they become co-opted. Or they don’t speak up because they’d like a knighthood one day. I carefully compiled a team of people who will never be co-opted. It’s not in their characters. They do not want knighthoods...

And our only aim, our ONLY aim, is to fix this broken system, speak up, and protect doctors and other NHS staff and patients. And this thing has grown from nothing. From less than nothing, from personal debt, to a thing which we’re very, very proud of. We’re independent...

No one influences our political messaging other than our members. We’re nimble. We’re embedded in our community of 1700 doctor members and we listen. And thanks to you, we’re growing.

I will never forget how this started. And I will never stop fighting for NHS staff + patients.