Mohamed Khadra – författare

From the author of the bestselling The Patient and Making the Cut comes the compelling story of two doctors on the front line. When old friends Jack and Tom volunteer for the army medical corps, both men are unaware that their lives are about to change forever. Jack is a first-class vascular surgeon with a strong sense of duty to his country, and Tom a highly respected anaesthetist with a young child. Given 48 hours to deploy, they leave behind their comfortable lives – and the petty rivalries and mindless bureaucracy of the Victoria Hospital – for a war zone where their emotional and psychological strength will be tested to the limit. Who can they trust when even young children are potential suicide bombers, and insurgents could be within their very ranks? Will they both return? And if so, will they be able to take up their lives where they left off?Honour, Duty, Courage is the culmination of Mohamed Khadra’s countless interviews with doctors and nurses who have served in the Australian military. Their stories have been dramatised and identifying characteristics altered to maintain confidentiality, but their duty, their compassion and their honour have been preserved. The result is a story that will keep you on the edge of your seat, and leave you in awe of the heroism of our medical corps.

Healthcare in Australia is in crisis - what are the solutions? This book is my attempt to find the truth about health care in Australia today; what decisions were made in the 1970s and 1980s that have resulted in the system in which I work; and who made those decisions'' After the success of Making The Cut, in which he described his work as a surgeon, and The Patient, in which he wrote about the life of a man terminally ill with cancer, Mohamed Khadra moves to their natural sequel - the topical subject of the healthcare system in Australia. In this book, Khadra explains how our hospitals came to be stifled by bureaucracy; whether we can and should administer universally free health care to our population; and how best we can do that in 2010. He also peppers the book with compelling examples of real people he has treated - patients whose health he should have been able to improve, but who became stuck in a system that made their lives worse. Heath care is an incredibly emotive topic, which everyone has an opinion on.

Lifes greatest challenges come from within. At 47, Jonathan Brewster finally feels like he''s king of the world - he has a lucrative job, a happy marriage, two children in private schools, an impressive house and a flashy car. He''s also hugely in debt, but that''s never really bothered him - until he wakes up at dawn bursting for the toilet, urinates blood and ends up waiting eight hours in Emergency before he sees a doctor. In the midst of his successful life, Jonathan has neglected to take care of his health, or even to conceive of the possibility of losing it. Urologist Mohamed Khadra comes into contact with this patient as he enters a maze of diagnosis and treatment for what turns out to be bladder cancer. For Dr Khadra, Jonathan goes from being just another patient - albeit a young one to be suffering from this particular disease - to something much more, as the parallels between them become apparent. Dr Khadra''s life, too, seems to be following its planned trajectory until his own first-hand experience of disease teaches him that life is fleeting and unpredictable. In being confronted with their own mortality, both Jonathan and Dr Khadra develop a heightened awareness of, and gratitude for, the lives they have lived. From the author of the bestselling Making the Cut comes this gripping non-fiction story of a stranger in the strangest of lands: the Australian health-care system. It is at once a reassurance of the ties that bind all human beings to each other, a manual for patients, families and health-care workers and a moving examination of the human spirit.