Dr Phil Hammond
Phil Hammond is a doctor, journalist, broadcaster, campaigner and comedian. He qualified as a GP in 1991 and is currently works in a specialist NHS centre for children and adolescents with chronic fatigue syndrome/ME. Phil is also a presenter on BBC Radio Bristol and has been Private Eye’s medical correspondent since 1992, campaigning for patient empowerment, open data in healthcare and for the NHS to be honest and transparent about the harm it causes as well as the good it does. In 2012, he was shortlisted with Andrew Bousfield for the Martha Gellhorn Prize for Investigative Journalism for a Private Eye Special Report about the shocking treatment of NHS Whistleblowers. Phil has also won awards for broadcasting, popular health journalism, comedy and teaching. He is Vice President of the Patients’ Association and a patron of Meningitis UK, the Doctors’ Support Network, the Herpes Viruses Association, Patients First and Kissing It Better.
Phil presented five series of Trust Me, I’m a Doctor on BBC2 and has appeared regularly on Have I Got News for You, The News Quiz, The Now Show, The One Show and Countdown. He has been a Lecturer in Medical Communication at the Universities of Bristol and Birmingham,. Phil’s Radio 4 sitcom about GPs struggling with the NHS reforms – Polyoaks – was written with David Spicer and the third series airs in June 2014. Phil has written three books – Medicine Balls, Trust Me, I’m (Still) a Doctor and Sex, Sleep or Scrabble? – and released two DVDs of his tours (Dr Phil’s Rude Health Show and Confessions of a Doctor). He has currently on his third UK comedy tour with Games to Play With Your Doctor and writing his fourth book, ‘Staying Alive – How to Survive the NHS’ which will be published by Quercus in January 2015
For all press inquiries and bookings, please contact Marc Simonsson 0207 497 0849 or msimonsson@richstonepart.co.uk
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Press Release
GAMES TO PLAY WITH YOUR DOCTOR
URGENT – The NHS needs you!
Politicians lie to us. The NHS is for sale. As the great Professor Harry Keen put it: ‘They are holding the NHS under water until the bubbles stop rising’, and the staff are too stressed and fearful to stop the sleepwalk towards privatisation. Patients (that’s you, that is) are the only people left who can save the NHS. With a lot of humour and not too much ranting, Dr Phil will wake you up and show you how, through a series of games, you can do your bit to win the war.
To reclaim the NHS patients need power, and Dr Phil will teach you how to grab your doctor’s attention and be the star of the show in your own consultations. No more staring at your feet and feeling like a spare part. You’ll be front and centre in the NHS. Learn how to diagnose your doctor , sing your symptoms, play dead and get out of the NHS alive – all through Dr Phil’s highly subversive guerrilla tactics, some of which are counter-productive and may get you removed from the premises. But at least they’re not boring.
Once you’ve mastered the art of being an assertive patient, you’re ready to take on the politicians. Dr Phil takes you on an incredible journey into the Heath Robinson monster that is the NHS reforms, where lurks the Laminate of Lansley and the Big Red Ball of Blame. On the way you’ll meet some incredible patient campaigners and whistleblowers who’ve tried to stand up to the Big Beast. But who is this evil controlling mind behind this wanton demolition of our nation’s greatest asset and our only major post-war contribution to civilisation (apart from The Beatles and Mo Farah)? You will discover but can you destroy? Or at least ask him nicely to take his hands off the windpipe.
Saving the NHS is the Greatest Game of All, and there are 63.7 million players. Our health service may be held underwater, but with your help, the bubbles will never stop rising. So come inside Dr Phil’s bubble for a hilarious 90 minute consultation. Free dentures (lie).
Phil Hammond is a GP turned hospital doctor, writer, broadcaster and comedian. He has been Private Eye’s medical correspondent for over 20 years and has appeared on Have I Got News for You, The News Quiz, The Now Show, The One Show and Countdown. In 2013, he cured the entire nation on BBC1’s Long Live Britain.
Phil Hammond first ripped into health secretary Andrew Lansley about his misguided ‘reforms’ in October 2011 on BBC 1’s Question Time. Since then, Lansley has been sacked as Health Secretary and Hammond lost his job as a GP. Lansley is now Leader of the Commons, Hammond works in a specialist NHS unit for children with chronic fatigue syndrome/ME. Hammond’s blood pressure rose to dangerously high levels after Question Time and – in the organisational chaos that followed – it would not come down to safe levels. Dr Phil is now a patient, on two pills a day for life. Thank you, Andrew Lansley.
The Lansley exchange, and the unfurling of the Laminate of Lansley, will take place on stage if Dr Phil’s blood pressure can handle it
Phil is also writing a book. ‘Staying Alive – How to Survive the NHS’ – which will be published in January 2015 by Quercus
Praise for Dr Phil’s previous offerings
“One of the most entertainingly subversive people on the planet.”
The Guardian
“Tough on doctors, patients and politicians. And he’s funny.”
The Telegraph
“Sceptical, irreverent, very funny and like a mighty gush of fresh air in a field that’s bedevilled with cover ups and cloaked in a vow of silence”
Time Out
“Generates dozens of laughs and more ire than any amount of tentative taboo-breaching”
The Financial Times
‘If Dr Phil were a medicine, you should swig him by the litre’
★★★★ The Times
‘Consistently funny’
★★★★★ The Sunday Telegraph
“You’ll never see a doctor in quite the same way again.”
★★★★★ The Scotsman
FFI and NEW TOUR VENUES, CONTACT MARC SIMONSSON msimonsson@richstonepart.co.uk 0207 497 0849